During all of this catching-up we drank two negronis each, at one point relocating to the kitchen (also empty — one set of dishes, no chairs) so he could make another round. After we had got the literal stuff out of the way, we were sort of at a loss. We lingered in the kitchen, him leaning against the countertop, me sitting on the windowsill next to a radiator. I sipped my third drink. I watched him staring at my breasts, which felt like the most sincere compliment he could give me.

“Yeah, I guess in sum, my life is pretty boring,” I said.

“Boring’s good,” he said, swiveling his head around as if just noticing the blankness of his apartment for the first time. “Boring means nothing’s going wrong.”

I raised my glass. It was almost irritating how comfortable I felt around him. It was like resuming the good parts of our relationship, as if nothing had happened, we had just traded genders and turned down the volume on the neuroticism. The physical distance between us felt good. I could plausibly keep him at exactly this length from me. He would be forever in the same room with me, but six feet apart. It was just as well that his life now seemed perfectly self-contained, finally stabilized. He had no room for me in it. Perhaps uncharacteristically, I was prepared for that, and I was happy for him.

♒

Twenty minutes later we were in the train station and he was explaining the party we were going to for “maybe an hour.” He told me it would be “mostly Columbia people,” even though most of them had graduated by now and doubtlessly had jobs, lives, other contexts.

He sounded somehow less enthusiastic about it than I was. “We won’t have to stay for that long,” he said. “But it’ll be good to see everyone, you know?”

Since we both graduated, he had been hanging around all these people we both knew in college, but had recently started to seem unhappy about his newfound status of visible minority among them. It’s not like we were going to be the only emissaries from queer Brooklyn at this party, but, y’know, he used to be just another smart girl. Now, who knows?

That’s the thing about transitioning in your twenties, I guess; you start changing a lot right when everyone you used to know starts learning the fine art of staying put. I thought about saying this to him but thought better of it.

We got off the train in Queens. The blocks we walked through were strangely nonspecific in their character — low garages, row houses, and boxy office buildings interspersed with blank lots and suburban-looking New England houses. We finally arrived at an unassuming-looking three-story brick building on a long block of identical buildings. He texted someone to let us in.