I found an old email from you last night, like from fucking 2004. I’d apologized for calling you at one-thirty in the morning. You said it was okay, you were sorry you missed the call, you were just watching TV, but you’d turned your phone on silent. I didn’t have a cell yet and couldn’t text.

My email was from around 2:00 a.m. Yours was from 3:34. I’d forgotten how late we stayed up when we were younger, how seriously afflicted you were with insomnia, how miserable and absent my body was of serotonin. I was exploding with sadness, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t mind phoning you to talk about it, either. You were so kind about it, always. Thanks for that.

I know teenagers are often just that way. I suppose I think of it in retrospect with particular melancholy being trans. I dunno. You were once the recipient of hours of my bullshit, so. I wonder what you’d think of my life as it is today.

Did I ever tell you I messed around with girls a few times? I was a sexless ghost in high school, as you know, and the few people I even told I liked boys—it was more just ’cause that was easier, the quickest way to make sense of myself. Both for me and for those around me. Lots of straight people don’t know this history (maybe you do? You’ve surprised me before), but there was a time when the idea of being a homo after your sex change just foreclosed any peeping pinhole of acceptance the outside world might deign to give a transsexual life.

I’m still single. Obviously, not much dating’s going on at the moment. I’ve heard of people sitting masked at picnic tables—that’s just too sad to me. These last couple months have been murder, but some things I won’t do.

I flipped through this book in the store a while back, an essay collection by a woman writing about her life and the disconnects between her and the world. It reminded me of what you and I used to write in LiveJournals and all the rest. I thought, If I’d seen this woman’s writing semi-privately on a screen, it would have slaughtered me. Yet the book in my hand left me cold. I think some words are only meant to be delivered in ephemeral pixels. We were sold that what’s written on the internet was forever, but the fact is, so much of it was impermanent daydreams and abysses, gone the second you forgot how to look it up or the owner deleted it or unfriended you, or it lived on a remote subdivision that the Wayback Machine just wasn’t meant to capture. You’re one of those; you deleted your LiveJournal years ago, and I know I know I know, I did too, but I’m still here and you’re not.

… Sorry.

You were maybe the only, and I mean the only, person who, from the beginning, ever made me feel something like normal.