Ana and I met in our first year of college when we were both boys and trying not to think about how it was the worst thing to ever happen to us, the two of us being introduced by this other gay boy neither of us liked and I said It’s nice to meet you like I was joking and she said It’s nice to meet you like she was joking, and soon we were eating french fries in the library basement by the anthropology folios and doing each other’s homework to see if we could, we were standing next to each other at a cappella practice quietly singing the wrong notes to Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison and La Roux’s I’m Not Your Toy to make each other laugh, we were taking the night train into Manhattan and sneaking into gay clubs to steal Long Island iced teas from bleary-eyed forty-year-olds and chug them on cramped neon dancefloors, we were sitting in the dormitory hallway with our lesbian best friends formulating ornate secret handshakes and saying “Freak it!” in our best frat bro-voice, and one night we were crouching on the same log around a bonfire drum circle thrown by some alcoholic juniors and I linked my arm through Ana’s and stared at her smoldering orange face, and she glanced down at me and squinted inquisitively and I knew I was going to fall in love with her before I was someone to fall back in love with, and as the percussion dissipated she and I walked downhill to the lawn between two gleaming black lampposts and stared at each other’s terrifying faces, she leaned in and kissed me softly on the lips and I thought maybe I could stay alive if I felt love for my whole life in every moment always, she was the first boy I had ever kissed and I wanted to be kissing a boy but I wanted so badly to be a girl while doing it, I thought who was I to kiss whomever I wanted if I wasn’t who I wanted to be kissed back and when we pulled apart Ana was smiling like she was thinking the same thing, two girls pretending to be boys on a shaded dewy lawn on Earth so we might be halfway further between here and lives we thought would be worthwhile, and for the next week we agreed to be boyfriends and sat on the starlit grass asking about each other’s homes and parents and friends and kissing by a hot dog cart on the Coney Island boardwalk and kissing in the windy steam on the laundry building’s heated pavement, and ten days later Ana called me down outside of my dorm house and said I think we shouldn’t do this anymore and I remember thinking I could have gone on pretending so much longer, I squeezed her chin in the diffuse yellow light and thought she could be really pretty if she gave it ten years and I could be really pretty if I gave it ten years, and Ana and I stayed casual friends the rest of college especially in the company of her friend Jonah to whom she introduced me and who would become my best friend in another story, so one time in the summer before senior year Ana and Jonah and I went on a summer weekend trip to New York City staying at a fancy hotel in Manhattan with plans to meet some mutual friends we didn’t care for, we jumped on the plush hotel bed singing to One Direction pop-rock songs and bought candied nuts from a steaming street cart and skipped arm-in-arm yelling obscenities down 33rd Street, we visited Jonah’s friend Bonnie’s apartment and she made us hot toddies and tousled our respective hair while complimenting it and presented us with a box of musky vintage clothes to pilfer, and so wearing long blue kimonos and fake polar-bear fur coats we went to some friend-of-a-friend’s rooftop Fourth of July party where we hugged young female strangers and complimented each other’s weather-inappropriate fashions, and Ana and I stood in the rooftop corner as she told me about her older boyfriend Marvin and his penchant for raspberry-flavored coffee and summering in Montauk and I said with genuine ardency how happy I was for her, and fireworks erupted in blue and fuchsia and green scattershots over the other dingy brick apartment buildings where other young people wanting to be in love stared at the colors of the sky, and when Ana and I turned back around we couldn’t see Jonah anywhere and we looked at each other saying Fuck and then received a group chat text from Jonah saying I’m not going to suck down margarita mix in the heat while you two fall in love, and Ana and I sloughed off our kimonos and furs and placed them in the startled arms of the party hosts and careened down the six flights of stairs to go search in the night for the person we could both admit we loved.
Ana and I stalked through the dark smoky-smelling streets looking moronically for evidence of Jonah on sidewalk curbs and potted window plants until we thought to text Bonnie whose only lead was the address of a party she and Jonah had been invited to, so Ana and I speed-walked toward it as our skin grew flush and damp from the midsummer humidity and our tank tops and denim shorts darkened with sweat and finally we came to a gated apartment where we rang 6E and the door promptly buzzed open, and after finally clambering upstairs we opened the apartment door to find Jonah snorting a line of coffee table coke and sitting on a couch between two thirty-something girls in black dresses and combat boots, and I yelled JONAH and they looked up at me and rolled their eyes while brushing their nostrils clean and joining Ana and me sulkily in the open doorway, and once we returned to the street Jonah paced ahead in taciturn briskness while Ana and I lingered behind at equivalent speeds and listened to the delirious buzzy sounds of the city’s electricity and indoor residents, and I said to Ana We’re not falling in love and she turned to me and said Of course we’re not and we both returned to looking at our rhythmic dirty fraying sneakers, and once we arrived at our hotel we three loitered in the illuminated marble portico and Ana said Morris just texted us to come drink at their apartment and wavering feebly in the yellow light Jonah said I think I’m gonna stay in for the night and I slinked my arms in embrace around them, and while my mouth was near Jonah’s ear I said I love you too and they pulled away giving me a tired grateful look and squeezed my hand and Ana and I departed into the night for Morris’s house, and once on the subway Ana and I leaned back against the shimmering plastic windows and it was quiet with 2AM desolation and as Ana rested her head atop my shoulder I remembered what I was, I remembered I would do anything for the feeling I’d been missing my entire life even if only in ravaged malformed fragments and even if it lost me the ones I loved, so I whispered to Ana I think you should cheat on your boyfriend with me tonight and she lifted her head and stared at me with huge stupefied eyes, and I knew she was roused by my abandoning my feminine proclivities and deciding in this moment to be the man I knew she most desired, I just wanted to feel close to a boy loving a girl and I was willing to ruin my heart by being the boy in this dark desperate equation, and I saw Ana’s face brighten slightly like she saw what I was doing for her and she nodded slightly in agreement as if thinking what a relief to sever from her effete Connecticut faggot of a boyfriend, and when we entered Morris’s apartment he and Lucas were smoking a blood-red bong on a flaking blue leather couch and Ana dragged me by the hand into a side bedroom where we collapsed together on a lightly deflated air mattress, and I smiled at Ana’s profound amorousness until I looked into her face and saw small teardrops forming and a tense expression of breathlessness, she began hyperventilating and I said [her name then] easy easy easy and squeezed her quivering hand and she sputtered I cannot do it I can’t fucking cheat on him, and I held her head to my clavicle and let her steady her breathing for a few dark minutes until I turned her face to mine and said We’re not going to do that tonight, and her face relaxed in sincere relief though I saw her gaze near-dreamily once again at this masculine decisiveness I had adopted for us, and we cried there with our foreheads pressed together as we reckoned with our terrible mistakes in service of some warped self-actualization, me having to play the man again to console my trembling friend because this is who I had volunteered to be to love her, her weeping because she wasn’t ready to play the girl if it meant abandoning the gay men who buoyed and affixed her to her semblances of love and safety, both of us crying in a dark room in a summer city because this is what we got for trying to feel like girls in every way but becoming them, the air mattress squeezed free of all air now as we curled forward on the hardwood wondering out of all the men that had asked us to be men how was it we’d been two of them.
Ana and I graduated from college the following year and our lives diverged as she began filmmaking in Europe and I went to Florida to get a fine arts degree in poetry, and I took a few more years to be despondent about my inherited malehood before beginning my transition to a woman and watching over socials how Ana was doing the same, her growing-out glossy blonde hair and mine draping a long curly black and her posing with her handsome oily-haired heterosexual boyfriend, and when love became hard to find I thought in fervent angst how I might have managed pretending for long romantic years to be a boy in love with a boy if it were easier than this, and I learned to let go of those thoughts as I inured myself to the brisk melancholia of loneliness and the surprising efficacy of love whenever it did arrive, and six years after college ended I was living in New York City when I got a text from Ana saying she’d be in the city and we absolutely had to get together, so I got dolled up in a breezy pink sundress and dark eyeliner and voyaged to the bar address she’d sent me and entered to find variously arranged dark red armchairs and projector screens playing quick-cut movie trailers, and I saw Ana leaning against the bar in a denim jacket and tight black dress reading a cocktail menu with focused curiosity like it were some ancient stone palimpsest, and when she turned to see me we both smiled euphorically and rushed to embrace each other and stayed like that in each other’s tenuous feminine arms for a minute, and pulling apart I stared at her radiant soft-sculpted face and I said Bitch you look divine and she smoothed a thumb across my eyebrow and said Bitch you look divina, and we crumpled together into a cramped armchair and she said It is so damn good to see you and I said I’m so happy you were able to squeeze me in, and the atmospheric din of movie trailers hummed and I asked Is there some event going on here and smiling she said They’re screening my short film soon in the auditorium, and laughing I pushed her chest and said I can’t fucking believe you and she flipped her hair in mock-pride saying She’s an auteur now, and I said Tell me all about this film of yours and she said It’s this sort of black-and-white vaudevillian silent romance and I said Starring the one and only you of course, and she nodded smiling and I said Should we go in and watch it and she stared in misty consideration at my face and said finally I’ve seen it a million times, so we sat there in the single armchair for an hour talking about our lives and loves and arts and bodies until the sun came slant and orange through the transom windows, and she asked What’ve you been working on and I said These days mostly stories about boys and she arched her eyebrow and whispered conspiratorially Did I make the cut, and I whispered As a former boy you did indeed and she laughed and nodded considering this and said I approve of this artistic license, and as the moviegoers poured from the auditorium in post-film critical murmuration I said I should probably get going soon and she nodded looking at her slim silver wristwatch and saying I should probably go rescue my boyfriend from his work thing, and I stared into Ana’s face and in its effortless femininity and sarcastic grace I remembered I might have loved her forever and was seriously relieved to know I would not, I was not sure if I would ever love someone forever but in the warm dark thrilling night we were girls who loved various things and found at least an ephemeral satisfaction in this, and as I embraced Ana goodbye and held her head by her weightless golden hair she squeezed my wrist a final time and we pulled apart and departed from opposite bar exits, I braced myself against the cool midsummer air and walked forward into the dark sprawling avenues and thought it was going to be like this for the rest of my life, I was going to be a woman on Earth wanting to be loved and remembering who I had loved already and hoping some of it would be enough, I would remember pretending to be various people and know now it was the time for frankness and actuality and to see what if anything to come from that was good.
