The kitchen bloomed with heat like a furnace, sweat beading on my forehead as Helen's hands—soft as worn velvet but strong as steel cables—guided mine through the dense bread dough. The yeast smell punched my nostrils, earthy and alive, promising something beautiful from this shapeless mass between my fingers.
"You've got to feel it change," she'd say, her silver hair catching the afternoon light streaming through those piss-yellow kitchen curtains she refused to replace. "Dough talks to you through your hands. Women have always known this—how to listen with more than just our ears."
Helen moved through that cramped kitchen like a goddamn dancer, even with her slightly trembling fingers betraying the diabetes that stalked her like a patient predator. She'd pirouette between counter and stove, a choreography so fluid you'd forget the absence that had carved canyons in our family landscape. My Papa and his occasional presence , who had long left her, lingered in the empty chair at the table, but Helen filled that void with her own kind of gold—wisdom baked into every loaf, every pie crust, every moment she spent teaching me things my own mother never could.
"Add more flour, but, do it gently," she'd scold, her voice warm despite the sharp edges. "You're not building a damn wall—you're coaxing something into being." Then she'd laugh, that throaty sound that made you believe in tomorrow even when today was crushing your spirit.
She was Diabetic, but she gave zero fucks about it some days. She managed it with such practiced grace you'd almost forget that the insulin every morning was keeping her alive. Sometimes, while stirring the sauce that would simmer all afternoon, filling the house with a red-tomato perfume so rich you could practically taste it in the air, she'd wince slightly, adjusting her dosage.
"Body's temperamental sometimes," she'd mutter, then wink at me. "But so am I, so we get along just fine."
She'd craft entire feasts she couldn't even fully taste—her diabetic restrictions be damned. The careful measuring, the precise timing—all part of her dance of defiance against limitation. Watching her taste just a microscopic bite of tiramisu, letting it dissolve on her tongue with her eyes closed in ecstasy, taught me more about savoring life than any fucking philosophy book ever could.
In that kitchen, with flour dusting our arms like war paint, she showed me that womanhood wasn't about what the world said it should be. It was about this—creation in the face of destruction, nurturing despite being drained, finding beauty in the mundane terror of everyday existence.
"Look how your hands are learning," she'd whisper, watching me knead with growing confidence. "They're remembering what they've always known." And something in me would ache with recognition, with a truth I couldn't yet name but felt down to my marrow.
She taught me how to chop onions without crying—"Breathe through your mouth, William, not your nose"—but never taught me how to stop the tears when thinking about her kitchen, empty now except for ghosts and the lingering scent of cinnamon and strength. It is my dead-name, and now you all know it, but I ceased caring about how much I hated it , and now its just a word. But back then I didn’t know what a dead-name was, or why it was called that.
Breaking those damn green beans felt like punishment—snapping the ends off each one, the quiet crack of their spines echoing in her kitchen. My fingers would get slick with that earthy vegetable sweat while a heap of broken bodies piles up. I would toss those bastards into a pot where hamhocks already simmer, bubbling and hissing like some witch's brew, fatty skin melting into a broth that smells like a country house on a Sunday. The country-style seasoning hits your nose with a punch of salt and smoke that makes your mouth flood. Steam rises in your face, hot as hell's breath, while those beans surrender their crispness and turn soft as sin. The whole kitchen reeks of pork and memories, that deep, gut-pulling smell that reminds you of it all.
The day I managed to roll out a pie crust in a perfect circle, she clapped her hands like I'd performed a miracle. "That's it! That's the touch!" Her joy was so raw and honest it burned. Later, washing dishes side by side, she'd slide her hip against mine in silent approval, and I'd feel ten feet tall, like maybe I wasn't such a cosmic mistake after all.
The kitchen radio would crackle with old jazz songs, and sometimes she'd grab me, spinning me around the linoleum floor, flour clouding around us like smoky stage effects. "Dancing and cooking require the same thing," she'd laugh, a little breathless. "Rhythm and courage." Her body, betrayed by illness but still so full of grace, showed me that pain doesn't have to define the dance.
Helen never said the word "transgender"—hell, it wasn't part of her vocabulary in those days. I don’t think anyone understood it back then. I did not know what it was. Or that it even existed. It wasn’t even a thought back then. But when I'd linger too long at the kitchen mirror, despair clawing at my throat as I stared at features that felt like prison bars, she'd somehow know. She'd slide a necklace around my neck and let me wear her apron, the one with embroidered roses that made me feel like something other than wrong.
In winter, her arthritis making her joints swell like angry red fruit, she'd still insist I learn to make her food. "Traditions matter," she'd say through gritted teeth, showing me how to score the top in perfect lines. "They're how we remember who we were and who we might become." Her fingers, teaching mine, were a bridge across time—women's knowledge passed down like precious heirlooms. We didn’t have door-dash or uber-eats back then. You just couldn’t call someone and get food delivered. It had to be done, with real hands.
"There are many ways to be in this world," she'd say cryptically, rolling dough with the back of her knuckles. "The trick is finding your own rhythm." And she'd look at me with eyes that saw beyond what everyone else did, beyond what even I could see in myself.
"Some people aren't meant to stay," she said, her fingers crimping dough around plum filling with mechanical precision. "Doesn't mean they didn't love you. Doesn't mean you didn't matter. Just means their journey pulled them elsewhere." She looked up, flour streaking her cheek like war paint. "But some absences create space for something better to grow. Like bread needs air pockets to rise."
When her hands would shake too badly to measure vanilla extract, I'd do it for her without being asked. She'd nod once, a silent acknowledgment of our changing roles. "Good," she'd say, and though those words should have felt wrong for what I was, from her they felt like salvation.
The Yule before I lost her, she gave me her recipe box—cards stained with butter fingerprints and spotted with vanilla—I understood it was more than recipes she was passing on. Each card, written in her flowing script, was a map to survive in a world that might not understand you. Every instruction—"bake until golden but watch closely, ovens are liars"—was really about life, about finding your way when the directions aren't clear. Like a foolish child, I’ve long since lost them. I just didn’t hold on to them in the same way that I should have. She would admonish me now for it I’m sure.
"Food is how we say the things we can't find words for," she'd insist, teaching me to make soup rich enough to cure any sickness of spirit. "When you don't know what to do, feed someone. It's never the wrong answer."
After she passed—the thing I couldn't save her from—I stood alone in the kitchen, the silence dense enough to choke on. I pulled out her rolling pin, the wood worn smooth from decades of her touch, and began making her cinnamon rolls. My hands remembered what she'd taught them. They moved through the motions—mixing, kneading, rolling—while tears fell into the dough, adding an extra pinch of salt.
The kitchen still held echoes of her laughter, the kind that made you believe in tomorrow even when today was gutting you like a fish. Her scent—cinnamon and rose water and courage—lingered in the fabric of the curtains, in the handles of utensils worn smooth by her touch. Her kitchen magic living on through my hands. My mother—the bane of my existence—refused even talk about it, her coffee cup trembling in her hand as she watched others consume this piece of Helen's legacy. I tried anyway. And I got a beating for it. This was normal for me in my every day life. It just happened. I accepted it.
Now, years later, in my own kitchen, I find myself standing like Helen did—one hip cocked against the counter as I wait for water to boil. I catch myself using her phrases, making her sounds of satisfaction when a cake comes out perfect. My hands, once so uncertain, now move with a confidence that would make her proud. The woman I am now was shaped in that flour-dusted kitchen, formed by hands that knew how to create sweetness even when tasting only bitter. Helen taught me that womanhood isn't something you're given—it's something you claim, something you earn through acts of creation and endurance and love.
In her kitchen, surrounded by the sensory symphony of cooking, I found pieces of myself I never knew were missing. She gave me the ingredients, but the recipe for becoming was something I had to write myself, one painful, beautiful, essential step at a time. When I make her food now, my own hands trembling slightly with emotion rather than disease, I can almost hear her whisper: "That's it. You've got it now. You always did."