Butterfly Affect

First Waves Day +13

    The meeting ended somewhere around half an hour after midnight. Some plans were quickly made for a same-place-same-time deal the next Saturday.

    Buggie cried some more, first in Ariel’s car, then in her arms, as the spider woman drove her to a street a few turns away from her apartment. 

    They exchanged numbers, waved goodbye, and Buggie went on her way. She wasn’t sure what to do from there. Tell her roommate for sure, but then what? She still had no idea what first name to use, definitely not her old one at least. Buggie would do, but only temporarily. She wanted to worry, worry some more and worry again. The emotional high had only carried her so far. Maybe she’d been too quick to accept this; she should stick to male pronouns until she knew more about all this, because this wasn’t normal.

    Then again, life hadn’t been normal for the past week. Self-doubt was the last thing she wanted to have on her mind. She thought back to how utterly terrified all this had made her during the meeting, but with hindsight, instead it felt like a weight was off her shoulders. Maybe more literally than expected; she felt like she was slouching less.

    Since it was her first trek outside at night since her transformation, she took note of how blinding the street lamps felt. Her new eyes came with increased color vision. So many things about her body were new, and she felt a bit more ready to acknowledge and confront them now.

    She batted her wings a couple times and hovered the rest of the way back to her building.

    He was pacing around in the living room, worried about how long it was taking his roomie to come back home, but he was worried shooting her a text message would come off as improper in some way. They were roommates, not lovers!

    A key rattled in the lock of the front door and he barely stopped himself from jumping off the couch, instead preferring to scramble to lift the empty takeout boxes off the table and into the nearest trash bin to make himself look busy.

    His roommate peeked her head out from behind the door and they exchanged a smile while he fiddled with the trash bag’s drawstring. “So how was it?” He tried to come off as casual as possible while asking, but wasn’t sure if he had fully succeeded.

    “Ah, well…” She bit her lip and walked inside, closing the door behind her. She opened her mouth trying to say something, but nothing came out. The more things changed the more they stayed the same, he thought.

    “…Learn anything new?” He placed his hand on her shoulder, trying to help the words flow out of her mouth.

    “I might be — am… like…” She mimed a hourglass figure with her hands.

    He squinted and scratched his head. “…Sexy?”

    “N-no!” Her cheeks turned a deep blue. “I-I mean, I don’t — I don’t know? I don’t think it’s… That’s not what I meant!” 

    Last thing he wanted was to make his roommate have another panic attack. He fumbled in her bag and pulled out the sports bottle; there seemed to be some nectar left in it. He passed it to her and she quickly drank what was left before sighing and sitting down on the couch. He sat next to her.

    After a few seconds, she took a deep breath and forced it out. “I’m… I’m a girl — well, a woman, like… Right?” She looked up at his face, as if asking for help.

    He wasn’t sure where she was going with this. “I mean, yeah, that’s kinda the issue, isn’t it?”

    “No — no, I mean, I always was a woman, but it’s the Waves-thingy, they did a thing, and, like… Now you can see it?”

    Nope, he was definitely confused as to what she meant. Is she saying she was crossdressing this whole time? “So this whole time you were a chick?”

    “No! Yes? Not really but kinda!” She bounced her legs in frustration. “Aaargh, why is this so hard!?”

    He thought hard trying to figure out what she meant to say. “Did your parents want a boy so they forced you to, uh… transvest all your life or something?”

    She snapped her fingers. “Trans! I’m trans! Not — not transvestite, transgender.”

    He remembered seeing this word on a few ads for gay bars and places like that. “It’s that gay pride thing, isn’t it?”

    “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought too! But it’s, like, different, it’s separate, like, you don’t just dress up, it’s like, who you are inside or something…” She pulled her hair behind her ear as her words trailed off, mumbling. “‘am Buggie…”

    He blinked a few times, feeling like the picture wasn’t any clearer. If he had to be informed about this, he should probably find a better source of information than his exhausted, rambly roommate. He opened his arms and they shared a hug. “Well, it’s super late, so how about you go sleep? I’m gonna go fetch my laptop and do some research.”

    “M’kay…” She stood up and slowly went to her room.

    That… could’ve gone worse, Buggie thought. It could’ve gone better, too, but so did everything in her life always. 

    She undressed herself and slipped under the covers of her bed in the nude, just like she usually slept. Ever since she had grown her wings, though, she’d had to change from sleeping on her back to doing it on her side. It had surprised her, however, that she fell asleep much better like that. She’d always slept on her back because that’s how she was taught people slept; that’s what she thought people slept like and so she did it like that too. But instead, curling up on her side and bringing her knees to her hips worked much better for her.

    She heard the coffee machine rattle away in the kitchen at the opposite end of the apartment. Was her roommate planning to pull an all-nighter for her sake? She didn’t know how to feel about that.

    She brought her knees even higher, hugging them, and closed her eyes, trying to ignore the swirl of anxieties going through her mind.

    His cup of coffee in hand, he collapsed onto the couch and sighed. Transgender, transgender… Where to start? Sure he’d had gay friends before and that was fine, hell, his best friend (roommate aside) was bi, but what the hell kind of sexuality was transgender?

    Scanning his memory for any recollection of the word, he remembered an article about a famous actress coming out as transgender. She’d changed her name to… Xavier and she wanted people to use ‘he’ now. That was as good a place to start as any. He opened up his internet browser, placed down his cup next to his keyboard and typed in the actress’s name followed by Xavier. The first few articles that popped up took on an incendiary tone from the headline. He grimaced and scrolled down to the first one that seemed to take a neutral tone. The further he read it, the more something in his mind bugged him: the article read like some sort of tone neutral obituary. It was like the article was scared to say anything beyond some sort of premorbid autopsy report of the actress’ career.

    That had been greatly unhelpful.

    He decided to change course and visit the websites of a few LGBT associations he remembered his gay friends mentioning once or twice. They were utter mazes to navigate, but he did eventually manage to find a buried menu labelled transgender. Clicking on it, he found a few definitions, which he read one at a time…

    …

    …

    Wait. So one can just… huh.

    That made sense, he supposed.

    Gender… He’d had thoughts about that in the past. Feminine this, masculine that, sure, why not, but why was it almost always with the intent to harm someone? Guys had to be guys a certain way, gals had to be gals, it’s like there was this stupid societal barrier between the two. Of course there’d be people that’d disregard that and be their cool selves anyway!

    He’d always thought himself as a male feminist, as it was intended that is, not as what sexist assholes on the internet had turned the label into. He’d listened to women’s stories, sympathized but never could empathize. He was just unable to picture himself as a woman, that just wasn’t him. When he’d learned of toxic masculinity, it had been a small epiphany — god, were people being assholes about what it meant to be a man! Masculinity didn’t deserve that bad name. Masculinity could be good! Masculinity didn’t have to mean traumatizing children and dismissing mental health! He’d made it his mission to be masculine the cool way, the way that should be the normal way, none of the machismo, all of the striving for good things for oneself and others. None of “men acting like sissies” or “women being one of the boys”, just men being feminine and women being masculine if that’s what worked for them, and of course vice versa.

    His thoughts wrapped back to his roomie. So she wasn’t just a feminine man, then? Even all her gendered hangups aside, she was more herself as a feminine woman, in the end.

    He kicked his sandals off and laid along the length of the couch. His brain was brewing something, processing all the many ways he now realised gender and gender norms could combine. He grabbed his cup of coffee on the table and took a sip.

    In retrospect, he was slowly realizing, whenever he’d tried to picture himself as a woman, it had always been as a feminine one. That had never felt like him, more like some random lady he was just imagining. Purely for the thought of it, he imagined what it’d be like to be a masculine woman instead…

    He jolted straight up and spat his coffee back out into his cup.