“I did, didn’t I?”
I didn’t say anything, and just traced my hands down to her thighs, closing down my palms around them to measure. My hands encountered her hip bones along the way, and I couldn’t stop but visited them again.
“What is this?”
That was a rhetoric question and she knew it.
“Come here, a bit closer, so I can cuddle you.”
“Why don’t you come this way.” She teased, but leaned in anyway. I wrapped my arms around her, ever so gently so the weight of my arm wouldn’t harm the fragility of her bones underneath. I kissed the side of her cheek and we went to sleep.
I for once stopped questioning whether or not she liked my body, the way it has deviated from what it used to look like.
That was, surprisingly, friendly.
2. I wrote so many poems for her.
That day, when we let each other go like sands dripping through fingers, I didn’t think there would be a day this stopped hurting. But it did. Five years is a long time, and every time I went back I was eager to dig down into my memories, to find the exact notebook with the exact picture of the exact moment in which she and I were looking at each other with those ingenuous eyes, each trying to read the other person’s mind, but we ended up failing anyway. Young lovers were supposed to be full of doubts, insecurities, and loss. We were not supposed to be looking for or at the same things.
I never regret having loved my inside out two times over. There was nobody in this world I have ever, ever wanted that much. I told her many times after many later heartbreaks, “I will be fine, bluebird. I survived you.” She said to me, “I am but a memory. No one can compete with that. But I’m not real, and these people, they are real. You love them. Stop comparing them with me.” But I was, and I am, because if my skin does not hurt because it longs for their touches, because if my heart does not throb when I hear their voice, and if I don’t have to stop to think whether or not I should kiss them, then I will be reminded of how fear has consumed me the day I realized I have never wanted anyone so damn much.
3. I know why.
Loving her is like tasting freedom on your tongue. She is not a her nor a him. I have that tendency to gender my desire in that way - calling her a her gives a certain image and feelings that I could not achieve had I thought of her as a man. But I was not falling into her because of her gender - I fell for her because of her gentleness and the way she softens my pain, the way her little fingers held on to mine and led me through those old bookstores, the way she shyly and earnestly told me all the sad stories of her life, all the people who have failed her and how much she missed them, all the lost loves and if I’m not a rock how could I not have listened, and felt, and fell for it.
I felt for her because for the first time it made sense that I should be in love with a human being with all the flaws and brokenness. I felt for her because for the first time it made sense that I should always feel this way when I am with a person whom I don’t know but would regardless feel strongly about. It made sense - this is how desire works. Almost sacred, always innocent, meaningful, and full of thoughts.
She stripped my femaleness and maleness away and all I’ve got left was a heart that kept beating in a way I could not control. But she who had tucked my hair on my ears and kissed my eyelids, she who made me feel as though I can forgive my hatred for being in the wrong body or the wrong size, comfortable with the length of my hair, and stopped questioning how I should look like the moment I saw my reflection in her eyes.
The sad thing is, I don’t think I helped her as much.
4. She wrote a poem for me.
And a story.
And that’s, somehow, is enough.
She made me me.
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