When I moved out of Brighton and moved in with Theresa, it was another desperate fucking attempt at trying to normalize myself, to keep Wendy locked down in the darkest corner of my soul. The truth clawed at my insides like rusty nails, but I shoved it deeper, buried it under layers of pretense and bullshit normalcy. My skin crawled with the wrongness of it all—this body that never fit right, this life that felt like wearing someone else's blood-soaked clothes.
Moving in with Theresa was supposed to be salvation, a lifeline thrown to a drowning person. Instead, it became another mental internal prison, just with different furniture. I was trying to be what I needed to be for myself, a pathetic charade of manhood, without letting Wendy out and without accepting the raw, bleeding truth that I was a trans woman. My chest ached every goddamn morning when I woke up, the weight of denial crushing my lungs like concrete blocks.
The morning light sliced through cheap plastic blinds like a goddamn accusation. Another day of pretending. Another day of coffee that scalded my throat but couldn't burn away the feeling that someone else lived behind my eyes, watching me from the inside out. Theresa was already up, the smell of her fancy French press coffee hanging in the air like a peace offering. Our apartment in Hickory Grove wasn't much—beige walls, beige carpet, beige fucking existence—but it was a roof and four walls away from Mary.
"Morning," Theresa muttered, not looking up from her cribbage solitaire spread across our scratched IKEA coffee table. Her fingers moved with surgical precision, dancing across the cards like she was performing some arcane ritual. I watched her hands, transfixed. How many times had I watched those same hands shuffle, deal, count—her brain silently calculating odds I couldn't begin to comprehend? Every morning, this same ritual, this same silence. Comfortable, occasionally, but more often than not, just empty.
I shuffled to the kitchen, my bare feet sticking slightly to the linoleum floor. The coffee mug I grabbed had a hairline crack running down one side—just like everything else in my life. Cracked but not yet broken. Holding together by some miracle of surface tension.
"Got meetings?" she asked, still not looking up.
"Yeah. Three back-to-back. You?"
"Client presentation at eleven." Her voice was flat, disinterested. The space between us stretched like taffy, pulled thin and ready to snap.
We sat on the recliner couch, side by side, working our two jobs, two islands of productivity in a sea of domestic stagnation. This was our rhythm now: wake up, grunt acknowledgments, work five feet apart in crushing silence, occasionally break for food, sleep, repeat. The American fucking dream.
But beneath the surface of this mundane existence, something was clawing to get out. In the bathroom mirror each morning, I'd catch glimpses of her—Wendy—staring back at me with accusatory eyes. You know I'm here. Stop fighting it. Let me out, you coward. My hands would shake as I squeezed toothpaste onto my brush, the mint paste smearing across the bristles like war paint.
The HRT pills sat in an unmarked orange bottle by the sink. Each tiny tablet represented another step toward becoming a stranger to the world around me. The hormones were already working their subtle magic—softening edges I'd spent a lifetime hardening, reshaping the landscape of my body into something that terrified and thrilled me in equal measure. Some mornings, I couldn't swallow them without gagging, my body physically rejecting the chemical keys that would unlock Wendy's cage.
Those little pills became my secret religion, a ritual performed in the harsh fluorescent light of our bathroom while Theresa slept or worked or pretended not to notice the metamorphosis happening right under her goddamn nose. Each time I placed one on my tongue, I felt my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped animal desperate for escape. The bitter taste would linger long after I'd washed it down, a reminder of promises made to myself in the darkest hours of night.
Sometimes, I'd stand there for minutes, pill between my fingers, sweat beading on my forehead like morning dew on poison ivy. The battle between who I was and who I needed to become raged like a fucking hurricane inside my skull. Those moments stretched into infinity—the universe holding its breath while I decided whether to step forward or retreat back into the comfortable agony of denial.
The nightmares came more frequently after that day. Twisted, sweaty visions of my body splitting open like overripe fruit, Wendy crawling out covered in viscera and amniotic fluid, her eyes wild with accusation. I'd wake up gasping, sheets soaked through with night sweat that smelled of fear and shame, the metallic tang of it coating my tongue like pennies. Those nights, I'd creep to the balcony and smoke cigarettes with shaking hands, watching the ember burn down to my fingertips, almost welcoming the scorching pain as a distraction from the war raging inside me.
Sometimes I'd go back in my head to my bridge. And think. Fifteen seconds? Twenty? Would Wendy emerge before impact, finally free as my body hurtled through the night air?
The thought both terrified and seduced me, a twisted fantasy I returned to on particularly bad nights when the whiskey didn't dull the edges, and the cigarettes didn't burn hot enough to cauterize the raw wounds of my existence.
For a year, I made the pilgrimage to Mary's house like a penitent, hat in hand, to see my own daughter. The humiliation burned like acid in my stomach every time I knocked on that door, every time Mary's critical eyes swept over my changing body, noting new curves with thinly veiled revulsion.
Gizmo grew taller over that year, her childhood features sharpening into adolescence. I watched the change from behind the glass wall Mary had erected between us, cataloging each new expression, each evolving mannerism, desperate to claim some part of her growth as something I'd contributed to. But the truth was, I was becoming a stranger to her just as I was becoming a stranger to myself.
By the time I'd drag myself back to the apartment, I'd be hollowed out, a shell filled with nothing but echoing rage and suffocating sadness. Theresa would look up from whatever she was doing, her expression carefully neutral, and ask, "How'd it go?"
As if she didn't know. As if the answer wasn't written all over my face like a fucking billboard.
"Fine," I'd say, the lie bitter on my tongue.
And she'd nod and go back to her cards or her book or her laptop, relieved not to have to engage with the mess that was my life, my relationships, my identity. The space between us grew wider with each passing month, a chasm neither of us had the energy or desire to bridge.
We slept in separate bedrooms by the end of the first year. Her door would close at precisely ten o'clock each night, the soft click of the latch a period at the end of another day's sentence. I'd wander the apartment in the midnight hours, a ghost haunting my own life, running my fingers over surfaces that held no meaning, no memory, no comfort.
The loneliness was a physical presence, a third roommate that took up more space than either of us. It pressed against my chest in the dark hours, a crushing weight that made each breath a labor, each heartbeat an exercise in futility. The walls of that apartment witnessed my slow disintegration, absorbing my silent screams like sponges until they were saturated with my pain, dripping with it like wet paint.
Food lost its taste during those months. Everything turned to ash in my mouth—bland and choking, a necessary evil to keep the machinery of my body running. I'd push pasta around my plate, watching the sauce congeal into a blood-red map of countries I'd never visit, listening to the scrape of Theresa's fork against ceramic, the only conversation we had some nights.
My body continued its rebellion against me, the hormones working their slow, inexorable magic. My skin softened, became more sensitive to touch, to temperature, to everything. Nerve endings previously dulled by testosterone now sparked to life, a rewiring of my physical experience that both thrilled and terrified me. My chest ached as tissue developed, tender to the point of pain when I rolled over in bed or bumped against a doorframe.
The pain was welcome—physical proof of the change happening beneath my skin, concrete evidence that Wendy was winning the war.
In the bathroom, under the harsh fluorescent light that made everyone look half-dead, I'd stare at my changing reflection. Soft curves were beginning to replace hard angles. My jawline was softening, my chest developing small, tender buds that ached when I rolled over in my sleep. Each change was a victory for Wendy, a defeat for the person I'd pretended to be for decades.
See? she'd whisper in my head. This is who you really are. Who you've always been.
But who the fuck was I, really? Not Wim—that pathetic placeholder I'd slapped on like a cheap Halloween mask. Not the father Gizmo had known all her life. Not the person Theresa had signed up for. I was becoming a goddamn stranger to everyone, including myself.
My reflection became both salvation and tormentor, a merciless record-keeper of a transformation I simultaneously craved and feared like a junkie needs their next fix. I'd trace the subtle changes with trembling fingertips—the softening jaw, the redistribution of fat changing the landscape of my face into something almost feminine, almost right.
The skin under my fingers felt alien, tender like a fresh bruise. Some days, I'd catch a glimpse of myself in profile and feel a shock of recognition so profound it punched the air from my lungs—there she was, Wendy, clawing her way out from the chrysalis of my masculine shell like a butterfly with blood-slick wings.
Other days, all I could see was the charred wreckage of who I used to be—a funhouse mirror abomination of masculine and feminine that satisfied no one, least of all myself. A grotesque halfway point that made my stomach heave. On those days, I avoided mirrors altogether, navigating the apartment like a blind person, fingertips skimming walls, refusing to confront the visual evidence of my limbo state.
In the kitchen at three a.m., I'd sit with a glass of cheap whiskey, the amber liquid catching the sickly green glow from the microwave clock. The alcohol scorched going down, burning a path to my gut, a welcome distraction from the constant screaming in my head. The ice cubes cracked and popped like tiny gunshots in the silence.
On particularly bad nights, I'd call Gizmo, knowing she'd be awake, another night owl in a family of fucking insomniacs.
"Hey," she'd answer, her voice thick with the weight of things rotting unsaid between us.
"Hey, kid. Just checking in," I'd reply, tasting the lie bitter as bile.
We'd talk about nothing—her classes, a movie she'd seen, a game she was playing—both of us dancing around the elephant crushing the air from the room: that I was vanishing before her eyes, becoming someone else, someone neither of us recognized yet.
Sometimes I'd call Mary, too, knowing she'd answer no matter the hour, her caretaker instincts overriding her simmering anger.
"What's wrong?" she'd demand, sleep making her voice sandpaper-rough against my eardrums.
"Nothing," I'd lie, sweat beading cold on my upper lip. "Just wanted to hear a voice."
She'd sigh, a sound weighted with years of disappointment that pressed against my chest like a stone. "Go to sleep, Wim. It's late."
But sleep was a luxury I couldn't fucking afford, not with Wendy pacing the corridors of my mind like a rabid animal, growing stronger with each dose of estrogen flooding my veins, each passing day marking her territory in my body.
The insomnia wrapped around me like a death shroud, nights bleeding into days in an endless procession of waking nightmares. I'd watch dust motes dance in the knife-sharp shafts of early morning light, hear the first birds begin their dawn chorus like needles in my skull, feel the apartment building slowly stir to life around me, all without a minute of blessed rest. My eyes burned in their sockets, gritty and swollen from lack of sleep, red-rimmed and haunted when I accidentally caught sight of them. The exhaustion was bone-deep, cellular, a fatigue that gnawed at my marrow, that no amount of caffeine could cut through.
In those bleary dawn hours, Wendy's voice was strongest, her demands most urgent, scraping against the inside of my skull. The barrier between us—already tissue-thin from hormones and exhaustion—would practically dissolve, leaving us occupying the same mental space, neither fully in control. I'd find myself reaching for clothes I didn't remember buying with hands that didn't feel like mine, applying lip balm with a practiced gesture that belonged to her, not me. The boundaries were blurring, the lines between us smudged like charcoal on wet paper, bleeding into each other until I couldn't tell where I ended and she began.
It was during one of these half-conscious states that I finally acknowledged what I'd been fighting for so long—Wendy wasn't some separate entity clawing for control. She was me. Had always been me. The realization didn't come as a lightning bolt of clarity but as a slow, crushing avalanche of acceptance that left me gasping on the cold kitchen floor at 4:37 in the morning, clutching my knees to my chest as silent sobs wracked my body, tears and snot mingling on my face.
I was Wendy.
I had always been Wendy.
Everything else had been the fucking lie.