We Were Safe, Right?

I broke up with Want because she wouldn’t go to therapy, but I never stopped fucking her. From three states away, I still sped over on Fridays in nightshade, woke her up to my mouth against her chin scruff, goldening in the Ithacan sunlight. I believed I could be good enough for Want, which is to say, I could be like Want, eating gluten-free and nut-free food in the dining hall downstairs because she didn’t think to walk elsewhere. Didn’t think to compare the finger-painted Keith Haring murals in the basement to the real thing. This was the real thing. When I dressed afterward, I texted her even from the bathroom, too eager to delay. Today we’ll go to the used bookstore, I’d say. I won’t make you leave your pocket knife in the car. Most visits, we never went to the town square with the bookstore.

Maybe I made a mistake breaking up with her. Our relationship stayed the same, but without the terms and protections my role as girlfriend would’ve afforded me. I hadn’t expected my loneliness in the loss of narrative—not when I had first conceptualized our breakup, using our open relationship to open-mouth kiss the person who lived below me, ugly-sobbing to my freshman-year roommate wondering whether I was emotionally cheating on her. On FaceTime I felt like a caricature of myself, unable to express everything nebulous I ached for and unable to stop aching anyway. And I had only come first once, the weekend I was going to break up with her, mere hours before I did, almost finally at an end that would situate the story. But Want still spent the summer small-talking my mom in my childhood kitchen and pressing her thumb into my palm over the dash. I had been a stupid tenant. I had broken my lease only so the landlord could insist I trespassed when I asked them to fix the leaking roof.

Breaking up did put Want into therapy, but only for three sessions. Her therapist asked the wrong questions: Do you need a letter? Why won’t you tell your mom? Can you imagine the cemetery before your father cemented there, back when he was driving himself left-legged to the ER, back when he was composed and cogent and alive? In Want’s memories, he endlessly repeated what he had said once to Want’s mom: I want a daughter, a son, and a kid with blonde hair. Likely misremembered to soothe Want’s little blonde brother, but Want didn’t know who to be if not special as a daughter but not truly a son. If to escape the constant grief of a future man she didn’t relate to, she had to abandon a past man she desperately wished to. I found myself agreeing with Want. Yes, I don’t see why the default is vulnerability over safety. I didn’t see how I had thought us here, but I was saying it, so I must have. I must have had the idea.

I was safe. I thought I was safe. I was so sure I was safe. I lived in a dark blue bubble in an underwater town in a blood-red state. I drank boxed wine diluted with Sprite. I lived in an all-girls dorm with my friends all coming out as not-girls. I lived past when I didn’t want to live and now what. The answer turned out mostly to be doing homework and lazily kissing everyone I loved. I got the flu a lot. I got groceries at Walmart because it was two minutes closer than Kroger. I could tell friends that Want was trans because we were safe, right? But I got along with classmates by defaulting to a fawn response, pushing from memory the deer that had once hit my mother’s car on my way to Want’s house, and not the other way around. I didn’t tell friends about the weeks before Want and I started dating, when she angst-punched a hole in her bedroom wall, and I bandaged her knuckles in our shared study hall. I could keep a secret. I could keep others safe from me, and wasn’t that my main concern. I signed up for group therapy and everyone was straight.

I tried not to think too hard. On weekends, I put on elaborate get-ups for house parties with the whole campus invited. Late September every year the anti-frat threw Deb Ball ‘for cross-dressers, freaks, and genderfuckers,’ which mostly meant male swimmers with tutus and female field hockey players with mustaches made from liquid eyeliner. But the DEI office hosted a panel on the history of drag and opened a confidential debrief space for LGBTQ-identified students, and I wanted it to be enough because I had fallen asleep on long-distance FaceTime every day that week with Want and I wanted a free Keystone Light.

I asked Want what she would do, but she didn’t understand the discourse. She just wished she could come, she wished her school had a boys-in-skirts party, she wished, “Any person, any discipline,” winking and waggling her voice low over ‘discipline’ and I knew she’d masturbate as soon as I ended the call. I felt like a bad political subject for creating a Spotify playlist about her falling asleep on the phone. I felt like a bad political subject for sometimes crying and crying and not knowing why, with no importance, no evident sociological critique, when she didn’t feel her own life so deeply.

But in my life I had watched Want dry heave to Disney movies too reminiscent of her dad. I had given Want hand-knitted gifts in baby pink and babier blue. I had asked Want to please tell me what she wanted whenever her wants changed, and she called me too eager and changed the subject. I could do anything. I could eat out Want’s balls until Cayuga Lake froze grey as my eyes, become a vessel of myself hovering from the ceiling to encourage her own ascendance, and still trying didn’t matter. Still I could wear a dress outside and she could not. But I wanted her to. I wanted her.

“I feel like a girl now,” she said when we broke up, me the only one crying. Who’s more girl than an ex-girlfriend?

After Deb Ball, Want called at 1:03 am, silent to my tipsy, until I thought I had hallucinated her. You, Want? You Want? I asked, until the pun of her felt violent against my tongue. “Someone was dead in the woods,” she said. When I read dictionaries cover-to-cover as a kid, I didn’t know ‘dead’ could represent a verb. I didn’t know ‘someone’ was sometimes the only name HRC would give you. I knew this girl could’ve been Want’s friend, or Want’s enemy, or Want and not me. I didn’t know what to say. “Please keep talking, Want,” I said, and she was already asleep.

The text messages show I loved her. I reread them to prove it, the mere fact of loving her. Not how much, how much has never been up for debate, only the feeling itself, or how I might be covering the feeling, or the dragging of the feeling against my collarbones. I became my own ghost. I became the hole in which I had tried to dig to the bottom, never realizing I had only created a bigger hole.

I broke up with Want because I loved her and she couldn’t love herself and I manic-beg new girlfriends to love themselves and Want never stopped fucking me until I stopped calling it fucking and called her the names she had warranted. I saw her harsh cheekbones in the café where this time I couldn’t take it back and what I remembered was us at seventeen humid-hot and wiped from lugging a couch three flights, in the backseat of her blue car, with her watching me pull my shirt over my head for the first time with wonderment and no words. I looked beautiful. I thought she thought I looked beautiful. I didn’t wonder yet if she wasn’t thinking of me at all.

But she didn’t assault me because she’s trans, I tell every new friend, over-clarifying to situate the story within the always bigger story. But she did, kind of, but not like that, like more that if you spend your whole life repressing your real desires and fixating on that repression because it’s not safe to simply say, I dream of being a girl, or of always having been a girl, or I am a girl, or a girl’s dream, but in a way that always has to have caveats, you’re probably not great at recognizing and respecting other people’s real desires either, especially when they have their own gender and trauma and sickness shit or whatever. When I read Nevada I wondered what Nicole would remember ten years later, but I couldn’t explain to anyone the reference that you have to already read trans lit and believe in trans lib to understand.

Want didn’t read Nevada because Want didn’t read, not even audiobooks because she couldn’t pay attention to them, or so she said. I read for her. As she crossed campus for her biostats classes, I read in her single: short stories, essays, strange maybe-poems published online in small litmags started from a teen’s bedroom, anything to expand my Big Feelings about being human instead of trying to quantify what being human ‘meant.’ I wanted to believe Want was right— maybe sometimes what she said didn’t ‘mean’ anything, she slipped into shallow water (it’s not that deep, you’re digging), but I couldn’t deny how my sternum felt. Not unsafe, exactly, but preoccupied with the complexities of conceptualizing safety, unable to answer a question without seven more questions like a dudebro philosophy major.

Now it’s half of ten years later, sometimes my girlfriend pinches a stray eyelash to my lips and I wish Want had been me. I wish Want had never been inside me. I wish the world could handle Want. I wish I could cut off Want’s hands. In my dreams I am an anthropologist calling a community my project. I am a fisherman wading away from the Cape as the tide erodes in. I am an underemployed ghost in the town’s haunted warehouse turned Halloween attraction. I am a girl on a screen in Want’s filmmaker debut, a projection uncredited. In my dreams I am a door and the key doesn’t fit. I ask for answers then I apply to PhDs. I scream on the street when a fire truck passes. Want is nowhere to be found.

“I want to hit Want with my car,” my girlfriend says. I want to mail Want DIY hormones. I want to mail Want’s mom a letter explaining everything. I want to seal up the story but I can’t lie. I knew Want and I loved Want and I didn’t complain about her cardboard food, or knockoff art, or trips up and down and up the stairs and nowhere else. I said I want this and I knew what that required of her, I knew how much that was, but I didn’t know what that required of me. An empty mass. Drunk, a nightstand for hands until she discovered their proper place.

In my heaven, I drive Want’s car away, and I don’t come back. I leave her so I can know a simple politics where I loved her for her silences without her cruelties. I flatten both palms against the wheel. Even in this version of the story, I let her keep her pocket knife against her side. I don’t know if I am kind for that.

Courtney Felle (they/them) is an MA/PhD student in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy and Disability Studies. They are interested in narratives of (un)diagnosis, craftivism via DisCrochet, large mugs of tea, ultra-specific Spotify playlists, and terrible reality TV. You can find their previous writing in SICK Magazine, Monstering Magazine, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among other publications.