My House of Pain: Theresa and The Quiet

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.