Queers are the only group I know who dread their kids won’t grow up traumatized enough. But we did have great hope and love for you all, too. For a very long time, I’d thought I wanted to work for My Community and stuff, but in practice, I just showed up to the odd event and self-destructed. It was a little different by the time we met. By then, I was trying my best. I’m glad you showed up to the second Trans Lady Picnic we had.

I wasn’t in the best shape when I met you, but I was really giving it a go. Trying to keep myself together. I was calmer. I was quieter. I felt better. Surgery helped. I was mostly just going to work and going home. I don’t know if I appeared stable. But I felt it. I love what you always used to say: “Whoever said alcoholics can’t be healthy without quitting just didn’t love drinking enough to figure out a way.” Ha.

The night before we met, I’d looked through my closet for a picture I cut out years ago from a magazine article about trans kids on blockers—but I couldn’t find it (still can’t). Then I had a long and awful message convo with an old friend, and then I had a bad dream. I dreamt my cousin had killed himself, and in a note, he said he idolized me. I’m used to nightmares, and I’m able to shake off bad dreams, but that one was still bothering me when you sat down next to me at the bar.

I think it was the first bad night of winter, too. I just remember when we opened the door to leave, it was like the city was flying sideways through clouds. Yet walking with you over the bridge and through the Exchange, passing between buildings, I felt unabandoned and beautiful, even though there was no one else around and the air was like needles.

It’s funny how we began to chase boys together after that first time. We would complain about boys, mack on boys, and still, in the end, go home fuzzy and fuck. You know that made me feel cis? The us-going-home part. Of all the things, I guess that’s weird. But I knew these two girls when I was younger who had that kind of relationship: basically straight, not in love—but took a limitless amount of comfort in each other, and part of that comfort included sex. That’s how I ended up feeling about you.

Later on that first night, you said you were this skinny because you realized if you could train your throat to talk like a girl, train your body to walk with its hips, train your face to stand electric shocks, it couldn’t be too hard to train your stomach to like the feeling of hunger. Later on that month, you told me you were raped, that you’d tried to kill yourself four times, how you tried to do it. And even later in the month, you brought out the before pictures from a deactivated profile and said, “Look, look at that. Look at that stupid dude!”