When I left Boston and returned to school for my final year, Anna and I would text occasionally, usually about posts on the counselor’s Myspace or things that happened during group, as she was still a patient there for the next three months. By the time I graduated we had fallen out of touch. We didn’t reconnect until we both ended up in New York two years later, me in Harlem and her in Staten Island. We met up at a trailer-park-themed bar in Chelsea, and when I walked in and saw her, I sensed that we would resume right where we left off. She was wearing a checkered button-down and flat-front pastel shorts. I was glad to see that she had come into her own; until then she’d always seemed torn between chunky costume necklaces and full-on preppy boy. She was soothingly easy to be with, and it felt good to spend time with someone familiar in a city that still felt foreign to me. This time we attempted an actual relationship. On one of our first proper dates in the city, she took me to a sports bar in Murray Hill to watch a boxing match: Manny Pacquiao versus Miguel Cotto. We sat at the bar and drank domestic beers while she explained the rules to me. Before the final round, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I want to come in your mouth.” I shivered at the thought of it, and smiled.

The second time we had sex, she fucked me with a strap on. It was my first experience with dildos, and they became a regular feature of our relationship as she veered increasingly masculine. She’d wrap her towel around just her waist when getting out of the shower, slap Old Spice onto her smooth never-shaved cheeks, pack her jeans when we’d go out at night. I understood these behaviors—I had often fantasized that I had a dick, but I couldn’t imagine trading in my God-given breasts, not even for a straight married woman.

Anna and I quickly fell into a pattern of her giving and me taking, and for a long while, she appeared to enjoy it. In bed, I didn’t do much besides lie there and enact dramatic orgasms. She was working at a women’s health clinic, barely making a livable salary for New York—hence Staten Island—yet she often invited me for long weekends at the Standard, the London, the Bowery, shelling out hundreds of dollars for each stay. She helped me move apartments three times, from East Harlem to Alphabet City to South Park Slope. She gave in other ways, too; she sent me literature about cycles of abuse and internalized homophobia, documentary films about being queer and Arab, queer and Muslim. I read and watched none of it, and I now realize these weren’t intended for my benefit only.