The concrete steps groaned their familiar protest as I descended into our basement cathedral, each footfall echoing like a countdown to sanctuary. Tonight’s humidity wrapped around me like a wet wool blanket, thick with the competing scents of vanilla tobacco and something Della was charring to perfection in that matchbox kitchen—smelled like catfish, but with her you never fucking knew until it hit the plate.
Miguel caught my eye before my ass even found a stool, already reaching for the good shit. The amber liquid he poured caught the string lights like liquid sunset—some Highland scotch that probably cost more than it should for a basement bar, but Miguel had his ways. The first sip burned familiar trails down my throat, mapping territories of comfort I’d claimed night after night in this underground kingdom of misfits.
“Mom!” Miranda’s voice cut through the opening guitar riff of “Comfortably Numb”—one of those songs that used to make me cry in the car with Gizmo, back when she was small enough to believe my off-key harmonies were beautiful. Miranda occupied her usual corner booth, but tonight she held court with Erik, Grubby, and Marcus, their faces lit by candlelight that smelled of cinnamon and old rage transformed into something softer.
I grabbed my scotch and wandered over, noting how Erik’s factory-stained hands gripped his beer like a lifeline. The boy looked exhausted—that particular brand of tired that comes from pretending to laugh at transphobic jokes all day just to keep your job, just to keep passing, just to keep breathing in spaces that would eat you alive if they knew.
“Wendy, perfect timing,” Miranda said, her voice carrying that particular combination of warmth and steel that only comes from surviving your own becoming. At forty-one, she’d mastered the art of holding space for everyone else’s pain while keeping her own tucked neat behind perfectly applied lipstick. “Erik here was just asking about the ‘right way’ to transition.”
“There’s no fucking manual,” Erik muttered, his voice bitter as black coffee. “Everyone online acts like there’s this perfect timeline—hormones by this age, surgery by that age, pass or die trying.”
Grubby shifted in their seat, a movement so subtle you’d miss it if you weren’t paying attention. They rarely spoke about their intersex experience, but when they did, it cut through bullshit like a hot knife through butter. “Bodies don’t follow timelines,” they said quietly. “Never have.”
The new pool table—still a source of bitching from the regulars who missed the way the old one leaned right—cracked as Ezra and Marcus started a game. Their blue hair caught the light as they bent for a shot, and I heard them call out, “That’s the fucking truth, Grubby! My timeline looks like a Jackson Pollock painting—all over the goddamn place!”
“Honey,” Miranda leaned forward, her scarves shifting like water, “let me tell you something about timelines. I didn’t start hormones young. Still haven’t had bottom surgery. You know what that makes me?”
Erik looked up, vulnerability cracking through his exhausted facade.
“A fucking woman,” she said simply. “Just as much as someone who knew at five and transitioned at eighteen. Just as much as someone who never takes a single hormone. We’re not products on an assembly line, Erik. We’re not following some quality control checklist.”
Della emerged from the kitchen, plates balanced impossibly on her arms, the catfish I’d smelled earlier now revealed in all its cornmeal-crusted glory. “Ya’ll talking about that timeline bullshit again?” She set plates down with practiced efficiency. “Miguel didn’t even start T until he was thirty-two. Didn’t stop him from being the best damn man I ever married.”
“Only man you ever married!” Miguel called from behind the bar, pouring something amber for Marcus.
“And the last!” Della shot back, but the love in it could’ve powered the whole basement.
The opening bass line of “Another One Bites the Dust” thrummed through the walls as Miranda continued. “The internet makes it seem like transition is this race—like if you don’t hit certain milestones by certain ages, you’re somehow failing at being trans. But fuck that noise. Some of us don’t figure it out until we’re fifty. Some of us know at five but don’t do anything medical until we’re thirty. Some of us never do anything medical at all.”
Marcus abandoned his pool game, drawn to the conversation like a moth to flame. His bisexuality might be different from our trans experiences, but the pressure to perform identity ‘correctly’ translated across all our spectrums. “It’s like how people act like I should’ve ‘picked a side’ by now,” he offered. “Like being bi at forty-five with a wife means I’m doing queerness wrong.”
“Everybody wants a fucking narrative,” I said, the scotch loosening my tongue. “Beginning, middle, end. Realized at this age, came out at that age, transitioned by this deadline. But life doesn’t work that way. Gizmo—” I felt my voice catch on my daughter’s name, that familiar ache blooming in my chest. “When Gizmo was little, I used to think I was protecting her by denying it. Now I wonder if I was just protecting myself. But you know what? Both things can be true. There’s no perfect timeline that would’ve made everything easier.”
Erik’s eyes were wet now, catching the string lights like prisms. “The guys at work, they talk about their kids, their wives. And I want to scream that I have that too, that I’m a husband and father, but they can never know how I got there. The timeline that would make sense to them doesn’t exist.”
“Fuck their timelines,” Miranda said fiercely. “I’m a mother, a partner, a woman who holds this community’s pain and transforms it into something bearable. The path I took to get here? That’s my business. The surgeries I’ve had or haven’t had? My business. The age I figured it out? My fucking business.”
Grubby spoke again, each word carefully chosen: “Doctors gave my parents a timeline when I was born. Said they had to ‘decide’ what I was by age two. That timeline almost destroyed me. Timelines about bodies are just another way to control us.”
The basement fell into that particular silence that happens when truth cuts too deep for immediate words. Della’s spatula scraped against the griddle in the kitchen. The new pool table’s perfect level meant Ezra’s shot went exactly where they aimed—no compensation needed for the old table’s charming lean.
“You know what I love about this shithole?” Miranda asked, gesturing around our underground sanctuary with one manicured hand. “Nobody ever asked me for my transition resume when I walked in. Nobody checked if I was ‘trans enough’ or ‘woman enough’ or following the right fucking timeline. Wendy just called me family and poured me a drink.”
“Damn straight,” I said, then laughed at my own word choice. “Or damn not-straight. Damn whatever the fuck we are.”
Erik finally smiled—a real one, not the practiced thing he wore at the factory. “My wife, she keeps saying I’m right where I need to be. That our kids have the dad they’re supposed to have, timeline be damned.”
“Smart woman,” Miranda said. “The only timeline that matters is the one where you’re alive and getting freer every day. Even if that freedom comes in microscopic increments. Even if some days you go backwards. Even if you’re fifty-three—” she looked at me pointedly, “—and still figuring shit out.”
Miguel appeared with a bottle of something expensive-looking. “On the house,” he said, pouring shots for the table. “To fucking up timelines and living anyway.”
“To the timeline where we all found this basement,” Marcus added, raising his glass.
“To the timeline where Phoenix is home safe with River,” I said, thinking of our youngest family member, still recovering, still becoming, still refusing to follow anyone’s prescribed path.
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