“Yeah, doesn’t she live at Vail House?” she said. “You’re both trans,” she added.

“Yeah, her,” I said. “I think I have a crush on her.”

“Oh. Hmm. Good luck with that,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

She seemed to think. “Someone told me that she’s actively not dating right now,” she said. “Also, maybe she’s straight.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “It’s just a crush. I don’t know if I’m going to do anything about it.”

“Mm,” Elena said, sounding unconvinced and uninterested.

Elena always had crushes for good reasons, usually on a close female friend whose intelligence or worldliness she admired and envied. She seemed to think that a crush was a humiliating downgrade from friendship, and out of a sense of respect she would try to stifle her feelings in a way that really just fermented the crush in silent, tortured yearning. Sometimes it would fade, but other times she would end up confessing recursively complicated feelings in a teary rush after some late night of drinking and long conversations. Sometimes her feverish desires were returned and would have to be painfully brought down to a normal level, and sometimes friendships were broken off or left ragged, and she’d cry bitterly about it and move on.

Asking her for advice seemed impossible because she lived in a world where women constructed grand narratives out of their lives, and I didn’t. I figured at some point, if transitioning worked like everyone on the internet said it did, my life would resemble Elena’s more. At the moment, though, people always seemed to glance off me like drops of water.

This was a different sort of crush, my first as a woman. It felt important in a way that seems funny in retrospect. I found myself half-expecting you everywhere. I would be standing in the kitchen making coffee, and I’d hear someone shuffling down the stairs and find myself hoping it was you, with some improbable reason to be at my house at seven in the morning. But then what? Oh, yeah, we met. Bye. It was never you, though.

October 5

Maybe I was expecting to run into you because we followed each other on social media, which you used like a diary. On Tumblr you reblogged pictures of high fashion, quoted Donna Haraway and Julia Serano, and took sides in incomprehensible arguments about gender. On Instagram you posted pictures where your face was obscured and documented your friends endlessly. It was like the divide between your inner and outer life.

I noticed that you were a member of a small friend group who played in bands together. Your pictures made it seem like there was always something going on in some living room, some kitchen, some backyard. You started commenting on my posts and it felt a little like we were becoming acquainted.