Back in high school… I’m not the same person… always playing to your own ends… truly sorry… It’s who you are. Disjointed words and sentences slipped through the haze as I dreamt of the night of drunken idiocy which led to Thalia discovering my secret. I couldn’t be sure that what I was hearing in my dream had actually happened or not, but it was as close to recreating that night as I was ever going to get and this particular missed conversation intrigued me to no end. When I started to wake up, I desperately struggled to hold onto the dream, to continue it and glean as much information as possible. Everybody knows how foolish this was; the more you try to remember a dream, the further you push it away. It’s like reaching for something under a couch in your mind, you can feel your fingers brushing against it, but every slight touch makes it more impossible to grasp.

As my eyes opened, all desire to reclaim my dream vanished as I stared at Thalia’s beautiful blue eyes. My brain was still flickering back to life like an old fluorescent bulb on the verge of burning out; Thalia leaned in and kissed me, shattering the poor bulb and leaving me a mindless pile of shards on my pillow. “Good morning, Jane.” Thalia’s voice was still heavy with drowsiness but damn if it wasn’t sexy.

My arms wrapped around Thalia and drew her close; my frigid apartment made our shared warmth feel all the more comfortable. “Thank you for yesterday,” I whispered, nearly drowned out by the traffic outside. Fortunately, Thalia heard me and grabbed my shoulders, pulling herself up to position her face right next to my ear.

“If you really want to thank me, we can stay in all day and do it again… a few dozen times.” If life mirrored television, the room would have brightened up instantly and an angelic chorus would have begun belting out “Hallelujah” in an appropriately over the top manner. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my Sunday. Thalia inched her lips closer to me; so much so that she was basically nibbling on my ear. “I really missed you, Jane.” Her breath tickled my lobe.

“I missed you too.” Truer words had never been spoken. For two years I had thought Thalia was gone forever, a perfect dream I had woken up from all too soon. Now she was here, she was real, and she was just as I remembered.

Thalia sauntered out of the bed and headed for the restroom. “You’ve got exactly two minutes and sixteen seconds, then your ass is mine.” The door closed. My ass eagerly anticipated its reckoning. As I lay in bed, trying to prepare myself for what was to come, someone knocked on my door. Haha, sorry, whoever the hell, not answering; kind of busy at the moment and all.

“Um, Jane, can we talk?” Sasha’s voice softly entered the studio from outside. “Please open up.” Her voice was somber and heavy. With unimaginable speed, I action-rolled out of bed and threw on my discarded clothes from the previous night. As I turned the knob, I was terrified at what I might find on the other side of the door. The door swung open as soon as I unlocked it and I was nearly knocked over by one of Sasha’s patented tackle-hugs.

“Holy shit, hello to you too.” I swear Sasha had to have been a defensive lineman in a past life. Sasha released me and stepped back outside of the threshold she had impulsively invaded.

“I’m really sorry for bolting yesterday. I just wanted to make sure you knew it had nothing to do with you. I’m one hundred percent behind whatever you do. It’s just, me and the fairy godmother have a history.” Oh really, you don’t say? Wait, fairy godmother? “I would love to sit down and talk with you about everything, or we can go out and get something to eat since it looks like you just got up. I -- I want you to know that I’m here for you.” There were about a million things I wanted to say. My heart swelled with gratitude and bliss at her remarks and every part of me was screaming to take her up on her offer right then and there. Unfortunately, I was on a pretty tight clock before Thalia would emerge and I could already guess how that scene would play out.

“Thank you, Sasha. I would love to go out with you and talk about all of this, but I’m feeling pretty ill. I was about to head back to bed and sleep off whatever’s wrong. Would you mind if we took a raincheck and did this sometime during the week?” Damn, I didn’t know how dirty lying could make me feel. It felt even worse when I realized that Sasha had completely bought it.

Sasha smiled and nodded. “That’s not a problem.” Sasha jokingly socked my arm. “Wouldn’t want you passing the plague to me anyway… Seriously, give me a call when you’re feeling better, or hell, whenever you want to talk. Okay?” This time it was my turn to smile and nod, trying to hold back a giddy tear that I refused to let ruin this moment. Sasha walked off and waved as I shut the door. The guilt I felt at unceremoniously sending her away drowned out most of the excitement from her support.

As I lurched back towards the bed I noticed that the bathroom door was already open. Thalia stood in the doorway, a look of consternation taking the place of her previously passionate stare. “Are you alright?” I asked rhetorically, already having gleaned the obvious answer. Thalia looked up at me quickly, seemingly startled by my presence in my apartment. Her face betrayed her emotions for a few brief seconds after she acknowledged my presence, then she hid behind the mask of a smile.

“I’m fine.” Yup, as predicted, we had entered into the territory of the infamous ‘fine’; a place so un-fine I don’t think there could be any more to worry about unless she added ‘don’t worry about it’ to the end of her sentence. “Anyway, I believe we were gearing up to do something. You seem grossly overdressed for the occasion.”

Some people are afraid of the dark, some hate heights, and others yet are freaked out by clowns. The thing I feared most was being falsely content; swallowed whole by the notion of ‘good enough.’ The dark specter of accepted circumstance creeps up stealthily and often you don’t realize you’ve fallen into the trap until you’ve already settled and made yourself comfortable. That day, as I dropped Thalia’s unspoken issue in favor of keeping the good times rolling, I unwittingly dove head first into the dreadful maw of adequacy.

***

The wall clock ticked and tocked obnoxiously, never allowing the silence to fully settle in my therapist's office. Outdated floral wallpaper and square patterned carpet gave this room a real seventies vibe and accurately demonstrated what a discount therapist could afford to decorate his office with. I sat on a lumpy, brown suede couch which smelled like golden-aged depression, and maybe a bit of urine. Brent, my therapist, sat opposite from me on a pleather office chair which he spun around in like a five-year-old hyped up on sugar. This guy did not know the meaning of the word professionalism. When I had come out as transgender his first reaction was to say, “Shit, there’s gonna be paperwork involved, huh?” Don’t get me wrong, he was friendly, maybe overly so at times, and accepting; he just lacked any sense of authority or wisdom.

“So, like, are you gonna start talking or am I gonna have to break out the ice-breaker questions from the patient workbook?” Love him or hate him, you had to respect Brent’s candid nature. Using his feet, he skidded to a halt facing me and leaned forward. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to keep charging your insurance for an hour of quiet time a week, but maybe you’d like to get something outta the deal too? I mean, besides that letter.”

Therapists were some kind of an oddity to me. I’d known Brent for about a year and a half at this point, but seeing someone once every couple of weeks and only ever talking about my issues didn’t really inspire a sense of trust for me. Hell, if it hadn’t been a necessary step in this whole transition process, I would never have set foot in his office. Nevertheless, the simple fact was that I was here, and for better or worse Brent was being paid to help me deal with life. When in Rome, I guess. “Hey, would you mind if we talked about my personal life a bit?”

Brent gave me a look of abject disappointment; it was as if his eyes grew tiny little mouths and were screaming ‘you’re shitting me, right?’ “Lady, you do realize this is therapy, right? That’s literally the main thing you should be doing here.” A valid point.

I inhaled a massive breath. “Well, I sort of kind of started seeing Thalia again. Actually, seeing might be overstating things, we just kind of got together a couple of times and haven’t really talked about what that means for us yet. I have a feeling that we are both trying not to broach the subject since we still have a small bit of lingering awkwardness hanging around because of her leaving. Oh right, Thalia’s back, that’s new. Anyway, she knows I’m trans now, so does Sasha, they both took it well even if Sasha and I had a bit of a misunderstanding when she first found out. Everything’s all cleared up now and we’ll be talking about it in depth in a little bit. Thalia has actually been helping me out a lot with transition stuff. Well, we’ve only done a couple of things so far, but as far as self-acceptance goes, I’ve reached unprecedented levels. I’m actually kind of afraid that I might be diving back into a relationship with Thalia again a bit too soon considering how things ended last time. I do still have reservations and hangups about the whole thing, but goddamn, she’s just perfect, you know? Probably the biggest problem I’m having right now is the fact that Thalia and Sasha seem to hate each other's guts for some reason. Come to think of it, they never even got along that well in college, but never to the extent where Sasha would get at Thalia’s throat as she has been lately. I feel like I’m being left out of the loop of something really important, but it really isn’t my business, I suppose, you know?”

My word vomit probably could have continued in perpetuity, but it was at this point where oxygen deprivation became a real problem and I had to interrupt my train of thought to breathe. I swear bodies can be very inconvenient sometimes. Brent’s eyes were wide and he had sunk into the back of his chair, physically deflated. He massaged his temple with a pen and stared at me slack-jawed. “Holy fucking shit, I think I just had a minor aneurysm.” They say to be a therapist you have to have impeccable patience; Brent must have skipped that day of his certification webinar. “If you want me to react to that in any meaningful way, you’re going to need to back it up about ten steps and slow it down… a lot. You said these two girls were already on not so friendly terms in college? Why don’t you start there and give me the whole story… at a reasonable human pace.”

***

Starting from college, huh? Guess that means I’d have to go back around five years to freshman year. Having had no real ambition or designs about my future, I went to the college closest to my hometown, about a six-hour drive away from where I grew up. The campus was shit, the curriculum was shit, the professors, for the most part, were a faculty of feces. I had no real direction and remained ‘undecided’ on my major until I was forced to pick one or risk not graduating on time. Really, the only things I cared about in college were meeting people and trying to explore my options as far as transitioning went.

Given that I was a massive coward, it would be a couple of years of living on my own before I took even the most rudimentary of first steps towards transitioning, so I guess that doesn’t factor into this chapter of my life too much. What I did try, all too often, was meeting people at school. During freshman year, I was that idiot who forsook all academic endeavors in favor of joining about a dozen clubs. What I hadn’t anticipated was that becoming a college student didn’t magically grant me an aptitude for social interaction and I soon found myself the awkward wallflower of about a dozen clubs. I became the person who would be greeted by tons of people on the way to class and still not have anybody to eat lunch with, knowing so many people tangentially but actually knowing nobody.

This cycle of detached familiarity with those around me was broken when I met Sasha. Whatever powers that be must have been smiling upon me that day, because out of nowhere I found myself being hugged by this incredibly beautiful woman. Actually, it was less of a hug and more of an aggravated assault. I had been minding my own business walking through the quad when I suddenly heard, “Joe? Is that really you!?” I barely turned around in time to see a streak of red hair coming straight for me. Sasha rammed me like a medieval siege engine and I collapsed like a shoddy castle wall. Seriously, I fell backward onto the unforgiving asphalt while my assailant landed on me. At first, I was pissed but when I realized that I had a beautiful woman on top of me my heart was inexplicably filled with the spirit of forgiveness. As it turns out, she had mistaken me for another Joe and had launched into her tackle thinking she was reuniting with someone from her past.

We both had a good laugh about it and just kind of started hanging out. It was one of those incredibly special immediate connections. The kind of instant spark that made you wonder why you ever thought making friends was difficult to begin with. Without sounding overly sentimental or cheesy, Sasha kind of saved me from the rut I had unknowingly wandered into. I started having fun again, laughing whole-heartedly at her wit, caring about myself and keeping up with schoolwork; many positive changes were made. Also, if it wasn’t already abundantly clear, I kind of had a massive crush on her. A crush I would keep a secret til my dying breath for fear of fucking up the one friendship I had in my life.

One of the interests Sasha and I shared was a love of rock music. I always tried to get her to go to some of the live shows in town, but she never wanted to and would always find something else for us to do. Finally, during the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I tricked Sasha into going to a live show at a bar we would frequent. She wasn’t too amused by this, but that would end up being one of the most impactful nights of my college career. That was the night I met Thalia.

After the band finished their set, Sasha and I grabbed a quick drink at the bar. It hadn’t been five minutes since the show had ended before the lead singer of the band that had just performed swooped in and jumped on top of Sasha. The singer, who was easily the most attractive woman I had ever met, tried to launch into your typical ‘long time no see’ catch up session with Sasha. My fiery compatriot was having none of that and promptly bolted from the bar leaving me alone with the woman I’d been dumbly staring at for a while. The woman introduced herself as Thalia and we talked for a bit, mostly about Sasha, before she headed out herself. Not the most exciting introduction ever, but life barely makes massive life-altering events notable at the time.

About a month into sophomore year, I ran into Thalia on campus and it was because of our earlier meeting that I had the guts to strike up a conversation. Knowing that I had been at her show, Thalia invited me to her band’s practice and I happily accepted. I followed Thalia to our college’s music room and met the rest of Thoughtless Crime as well as two musicians who just liked to show up and jam with them from time to time. Their names were Keith and Raymond. I’d love to say the three of us hit it off immediately, that the stars in the sky aligned and beamed down a divine light preordaining the fact that we would start a band together. I’d also love to say that I found a million bucks on my way home that day, but neither of those things happened. No, Keith came across as a shy awkward mess and Raymond was… well, he was an ass. Luckily, first impressions aren’t always correct and I learned that Raymond was tolerable and Keith was the biggest ass I’d ever met. Well. the biggest ass not including myself; I guess that’s why we get along so well, we’re just two cheeks in some jeans.

After a few months of hanging out constantly, Keith and I decided to start a band. I was a shitty singer and he was an awful bass player, how could we fail? Raymond agreed to join us when he heard from Thoughtless Crime that the bands at dives in town usually drank for free, and we found Max through Keith’s girlfriend, who met him in a pre-med class. Like a well-known superhero crossover team, we had assembled, but we still needed a name. During the great nomenclature debate, Keith had jokingly suggested we call the band Underkeith, after that everyone chipped in a suggestion involving their name: Ray-zor’s Edge, To The Max and of course The Average Joes. We decided to settle this the only way three guys and one extremely closeted trans woman knew how to settle something; we played a single round of a fighting game. Looking back at what our band could have been called, all I can say is thank god I was a recluse with nothing better to do than play video games my entire life.

The Average Joes started meeting pretty regularly and practicing all the time, often with Thoughtless Crime. For the first time in my life, I had more than a handful of people I could call friends and it was pretty great. So great, in fact, that I didn’t even notice I was seeing less and less of Sasha. One day, after rehearsing with The Average Joes, Thalia came up to me and asked me out; I did not see that one coming. She was never rude to me, granted, but she had never given any indication that she liked me whatsoever; I’m pretty sure I would have noticed something like that. Anyway, long story short, we started dating and it was pretty goddamn amazing. I was living the dream: sex, booze, and rock n roll. My band started playing the dives around town and Thalia’s graduated to some of the bigger venues around campus. During Junior year, almost a year into our relationship, Thalia and I moved in together. Everything was perfect... until it wasn’t.

One day during senior year, after band practice, I came home and found all of Thalia’s stuff was gone. I called everyone I knew that knew her, but nobody could tell me where she was. I waited up all night for three days straight until sleep took me by force and I had to accept the grim reality that I had been dumped in the most detached and insensitive fashion I could imagine. This next part is going to make me sound even more pathetic than I usually do, but after Thalia left, I kind of shut down. I still went out and did the bare minimum for survival -- worked my part-time jobs, went to classes, practiced with the band -- but I honestly don’t remember a single thing for the first few months after she left. Everything I did was half-assed; people could tell my heart wasn’t in anything I did. How could it be, it had been torn out. Sasha entered my life again in Thalia’s absence and Keith started coming by more often, seeing how bad off I was. Those two were better friends than I deserved and I’ll never be able to fully thank them for snapping me out of my zombie mode.

The shock to my system was what I needed to knock the fear of transition out of me, and I started going to therapy. All of my friends thought it was for depression or something of that sort, completely believable in the wake of The Walking Joe, but it wasn’t. I turbocharged through the processes necessary and got put on hormones as quickly as humanly possible to at least make some progress towards being more like myself.

***

Having finished my tale, I shut up and braced for Brent’s snark. “Well, that’s half an hour of my life I’m never getting back. I know I asked you to slow it down but damn.” There it was. Brent was leaned all the way back on his chair, his face pointed squarely at the ceiling. I had never wanted an office chair to tip over so badly in my life.

“I thought it was pretty damn concise, prick.” The one advantage of having an unprofessional and often times rude therapist was feeling free to reciprocate his rudeness. Honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way, not that I would ever give Brent the satisfaction of knowing that.

“Concise? You need to update your definition of the word. You could have stuck to the important bits, you know. I didn’t need to hear about the tale of the Four Non-Blondes.” Brent was still facing the ceiling but was now furiously rubbing his eyes with his palms. I rolled my eyes, my head, my whole damn body at his exaggerated exasperation. It must have been exhausting for him to be this dramatic all the time.

“Actually, Max is blonde--” My poking of the bear was cut off by the bear groaning like he’d just been asked to help an acquaintance move. Brent returned to his upright position, his hands now pressed together like a priest about to deliver a sermon.

“Oh my god, I couldn't give a damn what color your stupid friend’s hair is.” Amen. “Look, you obviously brought this up because you are seriously considering getting serious with that Thalia lady again. You’re a little nervous because of how things ended last time as well as the fact that she constitutes a whopping fifty percent of your support system right now. This worry, of course, being compounded by the fact that she has some as of yet unknown dark past involving the other half of your support system, Sasha. That’s about the size of it, right?” I thought about this for a moment; he’d kind of nailed it, honestly. My legs shifted and I adjusted my posture; for some reason, having someone I barely knew be this familiar with my problems was super uncomfortable. Maybe I just didn’t get this whole therapy thing. I nodded in response to Brent’s prompt. “Wonderful, see how concise that was? Anyway, if you wanted my advice, it’d be to wait a bit on the whole relationship thing. You two just reunited after a while apart, you’re ablaze with passion, things are exciting now and that’s clouding your judgment. Also, she is a pretty valuable ally in your whole quest to physically become who you’ve always been. That’s indescribably valuable and another failed attempt at a relationship with her would tank that boon. You should be focusing on yourself now, being who you were always meant to be. Some people change a lot during transition; not everyone, but some people. Letting go of a lifetime of self-inflicted repression may lead you to discover many things about yourself, and it would behoove you to know yourself through and through before truly letting someone else in. If you are so curious about what went down between Sasha and Thalia, just ask them. They may tell you to fuck off and that’s fair. It really isn’t your business, but you’ll never know if you don’t open your mouth. I know it sounds obvious, but communication only happens when you communicate. Don’t go expecting answers to come falling out of the sky at convenient times.”

Brent paused for a moment and looked straight into my eyes before rolling his own and smacking his forehead. “Aaaaaand I’ve lost you. You didn’t actually want my advice, you just wanted validation in your own plan to get with Thalia again. Now that I failed to provide you with said validation, you’re going to just dismiss everything I’ve said in favor of following your own original script. Anyway, your time’s up, get out, your face is givin’ me a migraine.”

I flipped Brent off on my way out of his office, as had become tradition, before heading home. I considered what he’d said and was honestly a little freaked out by how well he could read me. I had gone in there looking for validation, fully planning on launching myself back into a relationship with Thalia. Now though, nothing had changed and I was still going to do just that. Suck it, Brent.