What does it mean to live as a woman when you lived as a man for so many years?
From the outside it sounds simple. Put on a dress, a bit of lipstick, and there’s your woman. As if it were a costume you hang back on the hook at night. But I’m not a crossdresser. I’m not a femboy. There is no morning when I wake up and think: “Oh, today I’ll be a man for a bit.”
My path only goes one way. Forward. How far I go and how fast, that’s mine to decide. But it isn’t that I burned the bridges behind me. There never were any.
Unless one day I were to say: “I was wrong. I’m not a woman after all.”
Along the way I have lost so much. And I know I’ll lose more. Friends. Family. People I used to laugh with. Some don’t want to understand that a person is more than what lies between their legs, because that’s exactly what they shrink me down to. Others feel betrayed, as if I’d guarded a secret my whole life and deliberately kept them in the dark. When I myself sat in the dark for so long. And others are ashamed. Of me. Because of the neighbours.
Some avoid me when they see me. Cross the street, look at their phones, act as if no one were there. Others write to tell me I’m really very nice, but I do have a penis, as if that were the whole sentence there is to say about me. And there are women who explain to me that I’m not one of them. That I’m a cherry picker, taking only the pretty parts of being a woman.
If only they knew.
I didn’t choose this. At my birth something didn’t line up; my mind and my body never spoke the same language. And if I could trade, I would do it in a heartbeat. Give me the cramps, the pain, everything women deal with every month. I’ll take it. If only, just once, I didn’t have to explain who I am.
What you’ve lost usually stays lost. Sometimes someone comes back when they realise they were wrong. But for most of them, I’m not the one who’s mistaken. I am the mistake. And so they wait. Patiently. For the day I stand before them, meek, and say: “I’m sorry. You were right.”
They would welcome me with open arms. That’s the sad part. “Oh, everyone goes through a phase. Nice to have you back to normal.”
Normal.
What even is that?
Does she exist, the hundred-percent woman? The hundred-percent man? Maybe on paper. But in the heart? There are women who get stuck in like any bloke, and men softer than many women. No one is only one thing. Between the two poles lies an entire world, and every person stands somewhere in it, in a place entirely their own.
I want to be honest. There are days when I regret my decision.
Then I think: if only I’d pushed it away. Forgotten it, buried it somewhere deep where no one would ever find it. Maybe I’d have a marriage now. A wife, children, a home with the lights on when I come back at night. Then I wouldn’t have to wonder whether forty years from now I’ll be lying alone in a care home with no one coming to hold my hand.
I’m not asking for much. It would be enough just to have someone at all. In real life, not only behind a screen. Someone who annoys me because her hair is all over the bathroom. Who leaves the milk out on the kitchen table. Who laughs too loudly and sneezes too loudly and steals the blanket.
What I would give to be allowed to be annoyed.
I find love online. Because here there are people who don’t lie awake at night wondering how to tell their parents they love a trans woman. That sounds like small comfort, and sometimes it is. You can’t hold someone when there’s a screen between you. But often it’s what remains. And it’s more than women like me used to have, back before any of this existed, when they were completely alone with what they felt.
And then there are the other days.
The days when I know it was right. That it was the only thing I could do. Because once your mind has realised something isn’t right, it won’t leave you in peace. It knocks. A little louder every day. And as long as you stand against yourself, it torments you. Until the pain grows so great that one day you no longer know where to put it.
I opened the door before it came to that.
Today I am Valerie. I live as a woman, and I’m proud of it. I know the price. I pay it every day, in small coins and in large ones. But it’s the rightest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
And the next time you meet someone like me, you don’t have to understand everything. You just don’t have to cross the street.
And if there is a second life after all, I only wish for one thing: to wake up in the right body from the start. No detours. No explanations. Simply as the woman I always was. ❤️
#AIイラスト #AIart #transwoman
I’m standing at the window, watching you go.
You cross the courtyard, jacket only half on, car keys already in your hand, as if they were in more of a hurry than you were. You don’t turn around. I didn’t expect you to. But I waited a moment anyway, just in case. Hope is a terrible mathematician. It always counts on the things that don’t come.
Then the headlights come on.
For a moment their light sweeps through my window, across the wall, across my face, across the rumpled bed behind me. One last look at me, only not from you, but from your car. Then the light turns the corner, and the room goes dark again.
I know I’ll never see you again. You’re one of many. That sounds harsher than I mean it. It’s simply true.
And the evening had been so lovely.
The bar was loud and warm and smelled of lemons and spilled gin. And you were adorable. The way you tried to flirt with me. A little clumsy, a little too fast, at one point you nearly knocked over your glass because you talked so much with your hands. I liked that. It made you human. Perfect people are boring, and besides, I’m far from perfect myself.
We talked. About everything and nothing. And at some point there was this energy between us. Slowly, bit by bit, like two magnets you push carefully toward each other until they decide they can manage the rest of the way on their own. Your knees against mine under the table. Your fingers brushing mine, quite by accident, as you reached for the bill. Your gaze, which kept getting caught on my lips.
“Your place or mine?” you asked, and your voice cracked just a little.
I got into your car. You were nervous. It showed. You missed the gear twice and apologised as if I were grading you. At a red light you looked at me, and I kissed you, just like that, until someone honked behind us.
And then we were here.
You pressed me against my front door before it had even properly closed. Your hands under my shirt, cold from the night air, and my skin reached out toward them. I led you to the bedroom, slowly, walking backwards, without breaking the kiss. We lost clothes along the way, a trail of fabric from the hallway to the bed, like breadcrumbs for someone who doesn’t want to find the way back.
The sex was good. Long. I could feel how thrilling all of it was for you. How you trembled the first time you touched me, so carefully, as if you were afraid of getting something wrong. How at some point you stopped thinking and simply felt. How you moaned my name as if you’d only just learned it and never wanted to forget it.
For a moment you looked at me as if I were the most important thing in the world.
For a moment.
Afterwards we lay side by side, sweaty and breathless, and I rested my head on your chest and listened to your heartbeat slowly calming down. I like that part. Maybe most of all. The part where nothing else needs to happen.
It didn’t take ten minutes.
“Oh,” you said, reaching for your phone as if it had called you. “I have to go. I’ve got an appointment early tomorrow.”
Of course you do. Someone always has an appointment early tomorrow.
I didn’t ask what kind. I just nodded and smiled and fetched your shirt from the hallway. For a lot of people, a night with someone like me is an adventure, not a beginning. A story you tell someday with a slightly embarrassed grin. Not something you stay for breakfast for.
I walked you to the door. You kissed me on the cheek, quickly, already half on your way out. “That was nice,” you said. And I think you even meant it.
I liked you. Really.
And now I’m standing here at the window, my shirt pulled over my chest, my lips still a little swollen from your kisses, and the night is very quiet. Outside an empty bus drives past, its windows bright. It looks exactly as lonely as I feel.
I knew it would end like this. A hot flirt. A great fuck. And breakfast, as always, alone.
But you know what?
I’ll still take two cups out of the cupboard. Just in case.
Hope is a terrible mathematician, after all. And I’m her most loyal student. 🖤