Chapters (27)
But I had made that impossible answer possible. I was a woman now, had been a woman approaching half my life, and because the train was leaving the station again, I couldn’t help but ask myself the same question: Could you be any happier? As the train left its tunnel and began to hover over the Charles, I had to admit to myself that this was not a fair question to have asked all those years ago, even though I preferred being a woman over being a man, or that I was in a lasting relationship with someone who loved me for everything I was. By a certain measure, I was the happiest, the most content I’d ever been, but if I’d asked myself the same question at various points since my transition, my answer would have been: I was happier before, but maybe that’s all right. I spent so much of that time believing that I had lost the love of my life only to suffer the harshest tragedies. I had a hunch that becoming a woman would end up being better and turned out to be right, but even if I wasn’t, my journey across gender would have still been worthwhile.
I could have stayed a man, or at least presented myself as my version of one, and lived with Ralph in England as a professor’s partner at Oxford, moved with him when he decided to go back to the States. I could have stayed in the Philippines and become a doctor. I could have gone back to the farm to live with my grandmother and manage her business. All of these, for me, could have been happy lives, and at each turn, my decision to leave made it impossible for me to return to where I’d been.
I closed my eyes as I crossed that bridge, because it hurt to know that had I been the person now that I was twenty years ago, I might have stayed in place and spared two shattered hearts, mine and that of the man I loved as a man. Had I been the person now that I was at fifteen, I would have insisted on not leaving Nanay Coro’s side and prevented a different pair of heartbreaks. Yet maybe I needed to cross this many bridges to get to a state where even if there emerged other bridges I would want to traverse, I was finally satisfied with staying put, because I now know there’s no such thing as the single best, the single fairest life.