“Everything’s So Wonderfully, Damnably Perfect...”, or, The Tragedy of the Recalcitrant Heart
Life happens to be looking up for me just now. I’m back in school, I have a house, a car, a mattress that’s not a jumped up pool toy, pretty soon I’ll have furniture, and I’m out full time now. In fact the only time I present as male is when it’s really late at night and I have to get something from the store and my stubble is already coming back in and shaving and putting on makeup just so I can get a stick of deodorant (This is Florida, it can’t wait till the morning) or whatever is just not worth it. That’s it. This is the happiest I’ve ever been. And I do mean “ever.” Just one catch, though. I think I might be falling in love with my coach and dear friend. Who is straight, of course. In fact, as I’m writing this, she’s out on a date. There’s at least a possibility that she’ll see this, which is mildly embarrassing for me, but I’m a sailor and we feel no shame. So whatever. In the interest of not embarrassing her, though, I won’t use any names and as little identifying information as possible to tell this story. We actually met on an online dating site. She told me then that she was straight and we became friends over facebook and it turns out she lives about an hour away from me. Although without a car, she might as well have lived on the moon, at the time... We’ve hung out once in person when she came down to my neck of the woods and it was pretty great. I keep getting some ambiguous signals that confuse me and give me a shred of hope. Not much, mind you, but just enough. Not that it matters, because she could straight up tell me to my face “I’ll never be attracted to you” and it wouldn’t change how I feel. My heart feels what it feels and no one can tell it what to feel. My family was, unsurprisingly, not onboard with me loving a trans woman. I remember thinking I’m out here, all alone. You say I can talk to you, but we both know I can’t. I’m alone and lonely and dysphoric and in the midst of a scary process at a turbulent point in my life so maybe it’s forgivable that I develop feelings for the one person in my life who understands what I’m going through. I mean, she’s brilliant and motivated and charismatic, so brave (at the end of the day, being yourself is a radical act if you’re trans, and she’s unabashedly trans), She makes me want to be better... And this is all aside from the fact that I find her completely charming and the very embodiment of beauty. But then we come back to it. She’s straight. She’s straight. She’s straight, she’s straight, she’s straight, straight, straight! She’s straight, Sophia, she’s straight. ... I’m chasing a straight girl. Dammit Sophia, what are you doing?! Chasing a straight girl? Really? Whatever happened to “That’s not me, I won’t ever do that”?! Ooh, what about “that’s undignified!”? This. This right here is why, cosmically speaking, I can’t have nice things. Because it all balances out eventually, and the balance has to come from somewhere...