We didn’t know it in 2015, but we were having a life changing conversation. If we had known I think we would have chosen another location to conduct the interview. Anywhere else but a slumping floral couch in a bedroom in a run down Hamptons beach house in the woods on a bleak December night. But I suppose we can’t choose the exact places and times of our transformations. Think of how many fires burned; how many revolutions of skin and bone, how many colluding eggs and sperm it took for the two of us to be sitting there on my little couch, sharing the same waking dream.

“When I was a child I changed my name many times,” you tell me and my recorder. That’s another surprise I didn’t know about. “Many times,” you smile. It delights you. to tell me.

In your files after you die I will find all of your former names before you settled on Nicholas to go with your new gender at age 40. You were Cheyenne, Chenil, Peach, Jaki Katz, Gabriel, Gabe, Jennifer Better, and Gwenhwyfar before you were Nick.

“We were talking before about your earliest memories - of the fascination with transformation. Do you remember in the movie A Thousand Clowns where he gives his son the right - I think until he’s 18 - that he can change his name as many times as he wants, and try out as many as he wants?” I ask you.

“But I didn’t think that changing my name transformed me,” you interrupt. “As a very young child, I felt perplexed that parents had the right to place names on another being. It wasn’t that I hated my name, Jennifer, but the idea that it had been given me was wrong. And that’s what I wouldn’t have. I was the only one with the right to give myself a name.”

“And you were also the only one with the right to choose your gender -”

You nod in agreement. “I get to say who I am! That’s a very early stance. In a similar way, my father would not have me baptized, or Christened, you know that religious ceremony that babies do. His feeling was that it was my decision and that I should be conscious to make it.”

“Your father actually had a feeling that you had any decisions?” I laugh, knowing just enough about him from our meetings and conversations to know that he was a sinister character.

“That’s what I was told by him,” you raise your eyebrows with irony.

I’m handling you delicately here in these transcripts, testing our conversation, gently tapping, to see how much you are willing to reveal. We are not in love quite yet, but a few years into our friendship. I know that I can only push you so far before you will entrench yourself. Oppositional defiant was the psychological term you taught me to explain your behavior. In other words you felt compelled to do just the opposite of whatever was being insisted.

“There is this sentence that I know you don’t want to talk about,” I say hesitantly, knowing it might change the course of our interview. “This sentence that you were the product of a rape. And I don’t want this to become an interview about your father!” I add quickly. “But in how you see your story - that you arrived here as the product of a power struggle in a way?” I hold my breath.

“Hmmm. There are so many ways to dream into that word,” you say wistfully, sitting fully back against the couch. “You know, some things that must come about must come about by violence. For instance I remember when the Pine Barrens were on fire and it was really quite dramatic and an emergency, and firemen were camped out at the college.”

I can’t tell if you are offended. Probably you are playing cat and mouse, taking me into a fire in the Pine Barrens as a diversionary tactic. “I think that was before my time,” I say, trying to sound offhand.

“Well, it happens about every twenty years. The Barrens will actually combust naturally and burn for as long and as far as they do. And then the forest is renewed and it’s a natural phenomenon. And so, regarding it, you might say - ‘How terrible! This should not be happening!’ ”

You are longing to talk brilliantly in the abstract, rather than stumbling into the knots of your own history. You are nimble enough to be able to keep talking, while figuring a strategic way out.

“And in fact that’s what the firemen do say. They rush in to put the fire out. There are also controlled burns, but I’m just talking about a natural phenomenon. I mean, we know that nature is very violent, and that’s the way it is. And I think that some things can only be born that way.”

This meandering of yours is very attractive. “Did you ever ask your mom about your origin story?” I say, trying to move you back on course from the poetic interpretation you are seducing me with.

“My mother used to love to tell me my birth story, which was a happy little story. But I never did ask her to corroborate.” Your voice trails off.

“But then who told you that it was anything other than a happy story?” I am amazed at how hotly I pursue this, insisting on an answer.

“My father told me,” you say a little too quickly, and I feel the tension rise. “He told me by denying it. It was very interesting.”

I may be pressing too hard on this point, but you find a way to continue, into a reverie almost.

“He left when I was 14, and I’m pretty sure that this conversation took place before then. I don’t remember the context, but he said: ‘Your mother claims that I forced her. But of course that’s not true.’ And since I knew my father, I understood what I was being told. On the face of it you can take it any way you like, and wonder why would a father initiate this conversation with his daughter when he wasn’t being grilled on it? No-one was accusing him of anything. My mother had never said anything like that.”

You have only alluded to your father’s tresspasses to me vaguely in our friendship so far. But here on the couch I finally ask the question I really want to know the answer to: “ But you understood what he was trying to tell you - because he was the one who seduced you?”

You throw me a fiery glance at last. “I’m not going there,” you say. “What I knew about him was that he was sadistic, and that he would laugh at, scoff at, dismiss anyone’s declarations of pain, emotional or physical. He would minimize your reaction. Say you were over acting. But we’re not going into my father and the whole psychopath story.”

“OK. That’s fine,” I say. The boundary has been set. I am almost relieved to hear the gate clang shut.

After you die I will find essential missing puzzle pieces of your former identity. First by your mother and then by you, all the paper of your life was categorized by year and filed in the attic. I will find these amazing letters home from you. This one is from when you were thirteen, in 1967, when you were enrolled in Lewis Wadham’s Free School in upstate New York. The brochure explains that it was modeled on the experimental Summerhill School in England. They believed that children could determine their own lives and make their own decisions. In their fourth year they had 41 co-ed students ranging in ages from six to sixteen, one hundred and twenty five acres of woods and meadows, ten buildings, all heated and equipped with plumbing, a pottery and art section, a science lab, a four thousand volume library housed in one of five geodesic domes, a photographic darkroom, a nursery room, and even a small printing press.

This is one of your letters home to your father when you were thirteen. It sounds like a response to one of his letters to you, which I haven’t found yet:

“Daddy, Were you saying you and Mar(Mom) love each other in that incredible letter? If yes, wow, because I figured something out. When we lived in Newark I was a free child (in other words, when you and Mar could stand each other) but after that when we moved to New Jersey I started getting all repressed. Mar stopped letting me take a bath with her, you stopped letting me walk through when you were pissing, and you became a very angry-able person. I remember I used to see those tinfoil things of Trojans and I always wondered what they were, but I was too scared or something to ask. I thought they had something to do with cocko but I didn’t know what.

“One thing was kind of groovy, though, that about you telling me about fucking  —  I was so young. I can’t remember being told exactly, but I am going to let my kids watch. They’re going to be free children. Boy, I love life. I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide and rapping too. No-one will tell me where Doug’s knife is. I must be pretty convincing. I used to let death creep into my mind sometimes (before I went to school here) but it terrified and depressed me so much that I’d have to turn it away quick.

“I have a death cult and so far I’ve thought of 50 ways to die. Here they are in case you’re interested (that wasn’t meant to sound that way):

“Hanging, Bleeding to death, Burning, Disease, Gun, Asphxiation, Drowning, Strangling, Poisoning, Electrocution, Getting blown up, Murdered by animals, Jumping, Guillotine, Freezing, Run through with a spear, Stabbing, Squished, Suffocation, Frightened to death, Heat (steam?), Torn apart, Run over, Old age, Pressure, Exhaustion, Depressurized, Starving, Boiling, Thirst, Pining away, Beaten to death, Stoned to death Swallowing ground glass, Giving birth, Malnutrition, Choking, Shock, Grief, Dragged, Exposure, Chemical death (Napalm),Concussion, Piss or shit hole plugged up then jump on stomach (Laura’s contribution), Blood clot, Pain, Destroying parts of body, Skin suffocation, Bamboo shoots growing under skin, Mind death,(concentration on death).

“Aren’t they nice? People keep saying, ‘Are you going to do it?’ I really don’t know, but I only think seriously about it when I feel good. Love, Gabriel (Jennifer).”

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Around the time this photo was taken you started signing your correspondence with “Jennifer Better.” I know from your saved papers that your father was finally packed off and you and your mother were in psychotherapy.

“Were any of those photos from when you were drinking?” I ask, pointing to the set beside you on the couch. You rifle through the pile. Like show and tell, you have brought selections from your past for our interview.

“Just this one,” you say, handing me a photo of a thirty-something, strawberry-haired Jennifer, slightly blurred as she throws her head back, caught by the lens in mid laugh. It’s an electric jolt to my gut. Your spirit, firing out through time, potently. I wish I could have seen that Jennifer once. I have combed through my photo files again and again to find that photo of you that I know exists. But it must be somewhere in storage now.

I have to admit here to wanting to see my sober fellows when they were intoxicated. Not to wish for them to relapse, just to be a fly on the wall of a vivid moment in the past. I want to see them at the moment when they had exactly the right amount of whatever was needed to feel like a conduit to bliss, a vessel for liquid spirit. Like this moment of yours on film.

You hold up another photo of a newly sober Jennifer. “And this one was from a relationship I had been in for at least six years, and we lived together. It had become very unhappy for me. So, I got out of that, and I felt myself at the beginning of some transition. Certainly getting out of that relationship was a transition in itself.”

I don’t ask you to elaborate about this person. Now I know she was your common-law wife, Barbara. I know that you left her in order to trnasform into Nicholas. If I had known she bought you a brand new car when you left her I wouldn’t have been able to stay silent. It’s too good a story. Perhaps my discipline kicks in, and I refrain from leading the interviewee, knowing that if I wait patiently all of your story will come out.

“I hadn’t slept with any men since I had been sober,” you continue.

“But you did before?” I try not to sound surprised.

“Oh, sure!” You laugh without a trace of shame. You raise your eyebrows at me, your eyes sparkling and your Cornwall skin blushing just a shade pinker. “Oh, sure. I was pretty eclectic when I was drunk. And around that time I wanted to have myself photographed - naked,” you say provocatively. “So I have this one time sober with a guy, and I asked him to photograph me. I thought - I’m single and I better do this while I have the chance because I know I’m going to get involved with another woman. And I don’t cheat on people sober. So I’d better do this now, right?”

“I understand that impulse,” I say.

“I didn’t know where I was going at that time, but I knew I was going. Something was -”

“Oh, really?” I break in like a fool, interrupting your stride.

This is the perfect example of the interviewer missing a moment that is pregnant with possibility. Damn it! It’s my natural impulse to banter. I’m too excited by the content of what you are saying, and I jump in rather than following your lead. You were clearly at the beginning of a story

.“You didn’t just want to have the record of - hey I’m young and beautiful?” I ask.

“But I wasn’t that young anymore. My tits were getting saggy, you know -”

“But, before it all goes - let’s get it all on film?” I interrupt you again and I miss the arc of what you are trying to tell me. Now of course it’s clear. Again and again during these two interviews you reveal that there is a stagnant feeling that is coming over you. You feel dead. Then there is a leading, and an urge to move. You felt that urge, even though you didn’t know yet that you wanted to change gender, you felt there was a transition underway. It’s remarkable that you knew enough about your shapeshifting to want to commemorate that Jennifer on film before you slipped away into a new incarnation.

It’s strange that this would be the impulse, because one of the few times you really got angry at me was when I filmed you without your permission, reading to you from my perch in my basket chair, hanging from the big Katsura tree in the backyard. While you weeded underneath the shade of its branches I took a couple of photos of you in your garden outfit - dirty sun hat, khaki shorts, stinky Keds slip-ons, and old green knee pads. You didn’t protest. You had set yourself the Sisyphean task of removing each small Celandine Buttercup from the yard. The invasive creeping species fools gardeners with its early yellow blooms and green leaves, only to turn brown by June and continue devouring territory. Much like your cancer I now realize. But we don’t understand the irony at the time.

When you have successfully pulled up a whole plant you throw the tiny seeds into an old brass can. So our discussion - of Castaneda probably - is punctuated with delicate ping, ping, pings. How do you realize that I have turned on the camera on my ipad, since there is no shutter sound? It must have been the tone of my voice, or some change in the air. You threw me a sharp glance over your shoulder.

“I already know that I exist,” you said, dryly.

In the long silence your anger rose to another level. “You’re only filming me because you think I’m going to die,” you said bitterly.

What should I have said to that? “We’re all going to die,” I replied mechanically. It was the party line in our house during your cancer treatment.

“But when you do, you won’t have any footage,” you mumble, obviously regretting it the moment it leaves your mouth. And it is so untrue by the way.

“What did you say?” I asked, alarmed. It was very rare for us to have a real argument.

I don’t know how long it was before I spoke again. But I remember telling you that I was filming you because you were perfect. The moment was perfect. The sunlight and shadow, the air, and the summer day. And that I wanted it. No - not just that I wanted it but that I had to have it.

You were too angry to reply. I told you that there were two types of people, and that I was of the type who are compelled to create, and compelled to capture perfection when it arises. I have no choice. And then there are those who are compelled to remove every single Celandine Buttercup from the lawn, as you were doing below my swing. I reminded you gently that you were able to pick the flowers in your garden and bring them inside for your pleasure, while I could’t bear to take them out of the earth and sacrifice them. Somehow that removed your threat of going inside, and I turned my camera off.

But now I have to admit to something much worse. I took a photograph of you the day after your cancer diagnosis. The day you came home from the hospital when they put in your port. You were completely still, sitting on the velvet couch in the back cottage. Your face was as pale as your pale blue t-shirt, which faded into the white of the mounds of bedcovers bunched behind you, like clouds. The look on your face was so precious that I needed to have it. It was a look of total disorientation - wait, wait, wait a second - it said. Your eyes were focused somewhere way ahead in time and space, re-calibrating what it all meant. Your eyes understood that you had run out of time. I could never explain this to you, and I couldn’t help myself. I was a thief. I am a thief.

“I took a job nude modeling a few years ago for just that reason,” I continue, oblivious to the message you want to send me in these interviews, and obviously wanting attention.

“Oh, did you?” you ask, only able to mask your disinterest a bit.

“I figured: It’s time to learn to love yourself just as you are!” I say, boasting of my courage.

Two elderly former mad men, who had retired to the countryside were advertising to hire a nude model for painting sessions on an estate in East Hampton. After the initial fear, it turned out to be a rather boring stint, standing in that perfect garden across the street from the ocean, surrounded by the habitual high Hampton’s hedge on all sides. My chosen pose next to a tree with my arm up on a branch was very shortsighted, since my arm fell asleep quickly.

“Well, my photos came out very poorly,” you say quickly, bringing me back to the point. “He didn’t use the right lens. He used a fisheye lens!”

“Oh, come on!” I sputter.

“It was really awful. He kept saying - I don’t have the right lens, I don’t have the right camera. I didn’t understand what that meant. I said - I don’t care! Just take the pictures!”

“He didn’t tell you you were going to look like a funhouse mirror,” I say laughing.

“They were truly awful. But the point was that there was a transition underway,” you say, bringing me back again to your main point. “The relationship that was ending with Barbara had to do with the rebalancing of masculinity and femininity. It was all kind of like a tide swell before it became conscious to me.”

I haven’t found any of your odd pamphlets in the attic yet. The brochures about changing gender that you told me you had stumbled across and kept a secret when you lived with Barbara. I can totally understand your fascination for the radioactive material, and the fear that made you tuck them away so you could look at them again and again. What a secret to keep from a partner. Each time you read them, getting to closer to asking yourself whether you could be one of those people.

You continue at a speed.“And then the moment it became conscious to me I said: ‘That’s it, lets go!’ “

“Right, that’s what I meant about the tipping point!” I volunteer. “The tide swell is happening before you even really know it is, and then it reaches a critical mass -”

You nod your head. “And then it’s a moment of transformation that seems out of nowhere. Just like getting sober. It was similar in that - it became more and more painful to go on as I was…” you say softly, trailing off.

You are talking to yourself in the way you do when you only realize the truth of what you are saying as it leaves your mouth.

I let the moment settle before I venture in again: “Do you think now that the breakup had to do with this emerging - something to do about gender - or was it just personalities?” I hope my question is not too much.

“It was two things. As a man, I would not have been attracted to that woman,” you say simply.

“Oh, now this is getting really fascinating!” I say, sitting forward.

“And two, that woman’s spirit was stifling to my spirit,” you say sternly.

“But wait - this is so cool! As a woman you were attracted to her - right?” I stay on point here.

You pause to think here before you speak. “Sometimes it’s more useful to speak of the masculine and the feminine than the man and the woman - I think maybe this is true for a lot of gay people, but I don’t know since it’s not something I’ve gone around asking - but there’s a real clarity, not about gender, but about energetic polarity. I don’t know what to call it: S&M, Dom and Sub, masculine and feminine. I mean, people tag it different ways, but my position had shifted in that dynamic, and it didn’t go anymore.”

“Well, you might not know this,” I venture bravely, “but I did have one - I hate the word lesbian - because it sounds so mucky, like uvula. It sounds like all the words about the female. They’re all, like mushy…”

“That’s alright, dear. Most lesbians do!” You declare hilariously, and we laugh for a long time.

“I had one relationship with a woman,” I continue, ”and I was just thinking - being a woman, she was quite attractive, but if I had been a man- is it because my choices would have been wider or - ? I don’t know how attracted I would have been to her if I was a man.”

“It wasn’t in my mind that I am a man at that time,” you remind me. “So it wasn’t that I was thinking that now that I’m a man I don’t want you. To be more accurate I should have said that when the relationship was initiated I was inhabiting a very Yin position and saw this other person as the other pole.”

“Oh right!” I suddenly get it. “Because my girlfriend was very masculine! So, if I inhabited the other pole I might go for something much more feminine. I see!”

“OK?” You smile at my understanding.

“Right, cause she was taking up that space in the dynamic -” I rush on, excitedly, but you cut me off.

“And I remember saying to Barabara when we were together: ‘I need it back! I know I gave it to you, but I need it back now.’ But again that was before any conscious knowledge of what was underway.”

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Asking you to be my interview subject was a leading. You knew that to answer Yes would be a jump into unknown terrain. Even my hopelessly boring room on Copeces Lane was a kind of leading. Otherwise how did I end up living at the end of your wife’s former driveway? You must have gasped the first time you came to see me, turning on the icy drive and passing Tracy’s old house at the top. Another hint, another box checked, another petal ripped from the daisy - was our prayer being answered?

Even stranger was my discovery that I had manifested my room on Copeces Lane through visualization practice, which is another kind of sorcery we practiced in Debtors Anonymous, in which we used our imaginations to conjure up images of abundance.

When you and I fell in love I was a mess, fifty-two-years-old, overeducated and underemployed, and definitely damaged. I was poor, and I moved from room to rented room. I drove a hand-me-down car with no muffler, and pieces of rust falling off. I was shivering in my fear mentality and I wanted warmth and comfort. But all I could manage to visualize for myself was another rented room. At least the one I imagined was right off a deck with sliding doors opening onto a pool. A warm place with sunshine and water. By the time I moved into Copeces Lane it took months to realize that my new bedroom was the exact layout I had imagined, down to the side the deck was on, the pool and the sliding doors. I was dumbfounded that I had urged it into being. Maybe because it was a run down beach house in the woods with peeling siding, and creepy stoner yoga teachers.

This is the room on Copeces Lane that we are sitting in to conduct our interviews.

“ I want to speak to this word decision,” you say firmly, coming back into my bedroom and sinking onto to the sloping couch. You are clearly trying to direct the interview now. “…because a decision is an act of the will, an act of the personal self, the conscious mind, what some people call the ego, right? ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to stop doing this. I’m going on a diet. I’ll quit drinking’. Whatever, right? ‘I’m going to go ask this girl for a date.‘ “ you add, your eyes twinkling ridiculously.

Look at how many chances I have to flirt back with you, and how many times I choose to ignore your hints! It must have been baffling for men my entire life who did not understand that I really do not know when someone is flirting with me.

I refer us back to an earlier point in our conversation:

“We were talking earlier about the final transformation. Into whatever happens, if anything does, and we stop being physical - right? Someone who was with a friend’s father in his last moments said , ‘Well, he was ready. He made the decision to go.’ Obviously you don’t make the whole decision. You can’t. But when you’re in that tentative space where it’s dicey, I think you do tip the scale, right?”

It’s eerie that you and I discuss death so much in these conversations. It seems we had a common preoccupation, although in hindsight we knew almost nothing about it. I certainly had no idea that you and I had only five more years to know each other as humans. Or that you would write, “I want to die. NOW.” in the hospital a few days before you did.

You correct me here:

“But I didn’t ‘decide’ to get sober.is what I’m saying. If there was any self-determination in it, it was coming only from my unconscious mind. It was never in my conscious mind. I didn’t even decide to stop drinking. I didn’t say : ‘I’ve had enough drinking. I think I should go off to AA and tidy up a bit.’ I was brought to that point of desperation by my own actions. By drinking.”

One of my favorite expressions of yours from AA is that alcohol is a gateway drug. To sobriety.

My roommates come in, banging the front door and stamping the snow from their boots. Their voices bounce against the tile floor down the hallway in an endless bickering conversation, in which she explains exactly what he needs to do that he isn’t doing. Perhaps they are loud because they are always stoned, surrounded by soft emotional and acoustic batting, and they need to speak strongly to be understood across this third member of their relationship.

“Oh! Now you will see how loud it is when they come home upstairs. And you will understand...finally!” I say, pointing to the ceiling above our heads. They stomp up the carpeted stairs, and we can hear the muffled conversation continue in the master bedroom directly overhead.

You laugh, heartily. “That’s what we want, isn’t it? To be understood.”

“It really is,” I agree, sitting back with a long sigh.

“It’s what we want. If somebody could just stand here with me for a second, right? It’s sort of like this experience...that you’re offering me right now,” you say softly, hinting at the particular intimacy of this moment. But I choose for the hundredth time to let it pass.

I shouldn’t have been at all surprised by my ability to call forth this shoddy room on Copeces Lane. It wasn’t the first time I had practiced this kind of magic. A few years prior a friend gave me a DVD by a woman named Esther Hicks. She looked like a midwestern housewife. Imagine if Tammy Faye Baker were toned waaaaay down, and dressed like an activities coordinator on a cruise ship, and just happened to channel another entity from across time and space named Abraham. Her sweet face and bashful voice were so disarming that you had to suspend disbelief.

She explained simple little manifestation tricks, like carrying a hundred dollar bill with you everywhere you went, spending it mentally all day, affirming to yourself that you could afford what you wanted. The key was to receive the feeling of abundance and memorize it. It was the feeling that was the jet fuel. Whatever you kept sustained attention on was multiplied by the universe if you were steady and true. Good enough.

But it got tricky she demonstrated by holding an imaginary stick with one of her hands at each end. If you kept attention on the thing you wanted in the right hand it was bound to show up. But if you focused your attention on the feeling of not having the thing in your left hand then you only got more of not having. It was a revelation to me that longing only created more longing. “Oh, there’s that beautiful car/Too bad I can’t have it.” Since all of the juice lies in the feeling, we are unknowingly cutting off our power by confusing the desire with the feeling of disappointment at not getting it.

Nick, you told me how you sat on the living room couch on Pleasant Lane as a girl, leafing through magazines with your mother, longing, solidifying the family poverty story with each glossy page, re-affirming that those things were for other people and not for you.

I was still doing small painting jobs to earn a living at that time and the very next day after I watched Esther’s DVD I had an appointment for an estimate at a farmhouse on Old Stone Highway in east Hampton. Ruth Nivola, a magnetic, tiny, German, Jewish woman with piercing blue eyes, opened the door. Your eyes, I only now realize, were very startling and similar to hers. They sparkled with the same light. They pulled me straight inside. I felt that they saw more of me than I even knew about myself. Just like you, she made me feel that something urgent and important was going on.

Through the kitchen door at the back of her house I was met with blinding yellow floors that I learned later were done in enamel tractor paint. The old wide-plank, sloping boards were thick and slick with it. An antique rocker, painted bright glossy red, sat next to her black wood stove in the center of the long room. A huge black and white painting of the Twin Towers, handmade screened pie safes, which were white cubes that stacked like modern sculpture, two original rawhide snowshoe chairs, Sardinian baskets and rugs, a long porcelain farmhouse sink, and a tongue and groove wall of handmade cupboards that held every dish, pan, and piece of cutlery made up the perfection of the light-filled room.

Through the doorway you could just see the start of giant figures dancing across the dining room walls. Mostly black abstract shapes, but punctuated with all the primary colors, bold reds, yellows, blues and greens. The architect Le Corbusier had painted the mural while visiting in the 1950’s. It covered two entire walls, one in the dining room and rounding onto the next wall in the living room. It was the major event of the house, trumping furniture, which they had all but subtracted to make mental space for it.

Mrs. Nivola saw me standing transfixed by a large 6 foot by 6 foot square of plywood on the wall opposite the Corbusier.

“Who painted this?” I asked, unable to look away.

“My husband,” she replied, crisply and proudly, stepping up to stand next to me. The entire Sardinian town of Orani was painted in an outsider style as if seen from above. In the center smoke and flames rose up dramatically. “It is his childhood home in Sardinia. He paints a great fire in the church there.” Done in heavy oil paint with laborious detail, its surface shone in the late afternoon sun, showing the swirls of plywood grain underneath.

Her German accent was charming. She sounded like a girl who had learnt English at a boarding school. As tiny as she was, she radiated a huge presence. Later I realized how pleased she was that I had not asked about the huge Corbusier mural, but had instead been drawn to this intimate painting of her husband’s. Who knows if that had anything to do with what followed.

She asked me to go outside and make an estimate to paint the trim. I left through the back kitchen door and looked up to the window on the back of the house where the white trim was peeling. I heard music coming from the small open window in the cedar shingled wall. Suddenly I thought I would practice the manifestation thing I had just learned. According to Esther I should have started slowly, testing the universe, maybe picking the color blue or a butterfly. Sure, other people started with simple things, but I was going to go all out. I looked straight up into the sky, emptied my mind, and said: “I want to live in this house, whatever way that might be possible. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”

The next day Mrs. Nivola called to ask me if I might be willing to move in with her since her live-in helper was leaving. My room was to be the one I had stood under when I made my wish. Within a week I was living in the room above her kitchen, up the handmade steep yellow stairs in a soft bed in which I heard her old refrigerator below me singing. Mrs. Nivola never mentioned the painting estimate again.

Living there was to be a series of lessons in how to have and keep a home, including watering the plants each week at the same time so they didn’t “become anxious waiting.” Ruth taught me to clean their large waxy leaves softly with the lambswool duster. She taught me how to make all of our meals, including chicken soup from absolute scratch. I cared for her until she died, watching her take her last breath and shudder in that tiny bedroom, her family around her on the bed and the floor, and me sitting with my back against the wall in the hallway.

That was a leading and a leaping. What would have happened if I hadn’t felt that curious frequency and followed it into Ruth’s house? I would never have watched her take her last brave, rattling breath.

She was a foreshadow of what was to come for me, outliving her husband, and living with his weighty absence in the house. After she died the family gave me access to all of her carefully stacked, tiny diaries that she kept on a shelf in her bedroom closet. It’s like I went there to practice what I would go through with you, Nick. She also thought her husband was a genius, and spent years after his death maintaining their home, his studio, artwork and legacy. Then she had the time to become laser-focused on her own artwork. She stitched small miracles out of gold and silver thread. Maybe that’s what I’m doing now, spinning my own little miracles of words.

After my stoned roomates settle down above us I bring the interview back to our topic about a tipping point:

“But then there’s also the fact that there has to be some tipping point in order to be born,” I continue. “I mean, how many sperm are there? And how many eggs? And what are the chances, even if that sperm and that egg meet, that they’re compatible? Somebody told me once that actually it’s more than a miracle that a sperm gets into an egg because there’s a natural repellant involved. They’re not supposed to connect -”

“Well, she’s playing hard-to-get,” you bat your lashes at me, stalling my philosophical flight with some humor. “You know how you girls are…not you…not you…maybe him…”

I laugh. “So a gazillion sperm get released, and maybe even on that cellular level there’s a decision being made about transformation!”

“Well, I want to speak to that word decision again because my experience is that there isn’t a decision. My experience is that it’s a leading,” you remind me with some force.

“You said that earlier - a what?”

“A leading. Yeah. Now, maybe the leading comes from our unconscious mind -” you begin.

“But who is using this word?” I hint, wanting you to talk about your Aunt Edith and her New Thought ideas.

“I’m using this word,” you chuckle. “You’re trying to get my name again, aren’t you?” you mock interrogate me.

“NO! I am absolutely not!” I shriek.

I want to lead you into talking about your dear Great Aunt Edith, who was one of the most mystical and important figures in your life. You had already spoken many times to me about the woman whose picture sat on your desk and who sent you note cards throughout your life with aphorisms from her world of New Thought religion. This one was framed on your desk: “You can be/have all that you wish or want to be, but you must claim it. And claim it persistently.” She was responsible more than once in our life together for you buying me something special. Afterwards you would inevitably tell me that your Aunt Edith had told you to do it.

“But - can we call you ‘N’?” I ask.

“As long as you edit it out later,” you smirk.

“So, you don’t even want first names?” I say.

“That’s not important right now.”

“That’s not important right now, “ I repeat slowly, trying to understand what game I have gotten myself into.

“I don’t know where it originates. It’s a leading,” you reiterate, flippantly. “You pray, or maybe you don’t, but, let’s say you do. And you’re looking for what in AA parlance you would say, is God’s will: ‘I don’t know what to do. Please give me some guidance’ and then the next person you run into says something that appears to you a very unusual thing to hear. And you wonder: ‘is this a leading?’ ”

You pause and look at me deeply.

“OK,” I say.

“OK. So, is my prayer being answered?” you ask. Directly.

What a weighty sentence that I obviously chose to overlook! Seeing it here now makes me nearly gasp. What should I have answered you? Instead of letting the tension hang in the air I persevere on my track for the interview. As if I’m being professional.

“We were talking earlier about the tipping point,” I remind you. “It seems to me that there are things going on - maybe not decisions - but there are things leading to the point where we intellectually go: ‘Aha! I can’t do this anymore. I need to change.’ And that’s the tipping point, when it hits up here,” I say, pointing to my head.

But I still don’t glean what you are trying to gently impart. That the mind is the thing that thinks it decides, but that real change doesn’t come from our minds. It rises from a much deeper well. You are trying to lead me into the knowing that will come a few days later when I play our interviews back and realize that we are in love with each other. I see now how much you are the one in charge of the knowing, even though you refuse any responsibility. You let the whole thing be my idea. How very, very clever.

TO BE CONT…

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“The Dark Side: I called it ‘the bird’ many years ago when I first felt myself possessed, or used by a god to express its pure essence…Once the raptor has recognized his rare prey, I have never controlled him, never wanted to! I am told he is too violent, too cold, too sudden, too inconsiderate, too deaf to protest, too MUCH! Dial it back, you’re too too too. It is very tiresome, and an insult to the bird to let him have his prey, then tell him he must eat it politely!...”

You were more in charge of our dramatic conflagration than I had imagined at the time. These emails are proof of what a trained hypnotherapist can do with his powers. This was a possession. No matter how many times you suggested that ‘we’ were in the grip of a force, it is plain now that you were playing the predator and I was the willing prey. It doesn’t matter now. Even with all this knowledge of hindsight, I would have taken you no matter what it cost.

Now the frozen Husdon river sped below me on the right side of the southern bound Amtrak back to New York City. The force that had hurled me north along these tracks was now propelling me home again across the boundary lines of our friendship and your marriage. It was huge thing, much too big for me to hold. I wasn’t at all ready. I needed relief from the intensity that you and I created. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, but my head danced in a loop with images of you and the urgent missives you sent.

I closed my laptop and lay my head against the wall of the rocking train car. I lifted my knees and placed them high up on the seatback in front of me, my surefire way to fall asleep on a train. I threw my poncho, that had seen me through the freezing days at Camp Hill, over my head, making me look like a cocooned creature. This thick wool, bright blue on one side and gray on the other, had been my companion on planes and trains to Paris, Budapest, Prague, London, Berlin. It was my version of Linus’ blanket that could protect me from any ill wind, cross any boundary line, any fluctuation in temperature or emotion.

But I couldn’t stop my mind, and as the train picked up speed strange recurring images of you appeared again on the insides of my lids. These imprints of serious, sudden, cold and erotic gestures seemed to defy what I consciously knew about you. I sent you an email asking if you had been transmitting these images to me on the ‘alternative airwaves of the soul.’ You answered:

“...We have beckoned one another’s shadow, and the confrontation with it is exhilarating, terrifying, awful, to say the least! Truly a psychotic experience. I dare to wonder whether this is a process of reunification with a disowned power… Will the true heart be able to rule it? I will do anything not to end our conversation. This is how submission to love transforms.”

My first night home on Copeces Lane I woke at 4:00 AM and couldn’t fall back to sleep. It was urgent that I remove the boxes of your wife’s doll furniture from my bedroom. Before you and I had come to our epiphany about being on love, she had entrusted me to sell her entire hoard of small treasures, and I had been artfully photographing tiny groupings of her items on my dresser tops to sell in my Etsy shop. Now I threw all of it back into boxes - tiny brass chandeliers, hand-painted miniature rugs, an impossibly detailed set of blue willow china, chests of drawers, mirrors, sinks and bathtubs made of real porcelain, tiny picture frames with cutouts from magazines that she had saved her entire life. It was much too much. Are other people’s lives full of such symbology, or do I just need to have things spelled out louder?

The next few days back were startlingly painful with emotions fluctuating from hour to hour from absolute bliss to despair. If I thought I saw Tracy in the grocery store, or her silver car in the AA parking lot, I was seized with panic. Your emails and phone calls set off fiery geysers in my stomach. My body simply couldn’t handle the extremes. I would suddenly be so overcome with physical pain that I would have to bend over until it passed.

The following Sunday you insisted that we see each other in person. It was a big step because up until this point we had never actually touched each other. Except the one time during an interview when I had suddenly poked my finger into your side, just to test your reality. You arrived at Copeces Lane in one of your carefully tailored suit jackets and pleated pants, gorgeous polished shoes with laces, and your carefully cut and waxed short hair, glistening. Church clothes. You had been to the Presbyterian service in Amagansett because the pastor was your AA sponsee. You sat on the edge of my bed in my room, sunlight bouncing off the snow on the back deck, spilling through the glass doors. Your eyes pleaded for some kind of intercession.Your face was in such exquisite pain.

As I leaned toward you, you quickly put up your hand, and said: “No!”

But I said gently: “Not that way,” and I leaned in again and you let me kiss you softly on the forehead. “Like that,” I said, giving you a kiss that would not awaken the bird.

That’s the exact kiss you gave back to me a few weeks after you died. You woke me one morning in our out attic bed with a ghost kiss squarely between my brows, a physical imprint that woke me out of sleep like a bolt of lightning.

On Monday at our usual Debtors Anonymous meeting you sat across from me at that oak table in the Yule room, as we had for years. It was all exactly the same, but we were absolutely changed and charged. You looked as if a light had been turned on inside you and it was spilling out of your eyes. I hoped no-one else could see our new buoyancy, and that we were practically levitating. Even though this was a DA meeting, most of the members were also in AA, and that crossover could be fatal, since gossip spread like wildfire.

AA is a complicated maze, a small town within a small town, peopled with ex-sponsor/sponsee relationships, and ex-lovers, ex-husband’s and wives, former enemies now friends, and vice versa. It is a constantly shifting terrain. Over the course of fifteen years AA watched me go out on many limbs, and make painful mistakes. I must have been a delightful hurricane to the more seasoned women who looked on with pity and recognition. I didn’t want you and I to be viewed in that way, as just another mistake along the way to something else.

Outside the church that night, after the smalltalk, we locked the meeting door and stood by ourselves under the bulb of the small portico in the cold, our breath making visible our internal charge. We made sure the others had driven away before we walked into the true darkness under the giant overarching oaks, and headed toward the sound of the ocean only a block away. I don’t know when your gloved hand ended up in mine, but as we headed back toward the church and stood under the steeple you quickly jerked it back out of mine. You looked furtively across to the closed farmer’s market to make sure no-one on the deserted winter street might see us - absurd. I felt like you had stabbed me. Strange how many small rejections there were early on, and that I weathered them all.

When I got into my old Subaru that night - a bedraggled, double hand-me-down from a friend’s daughter - I couldn’t turn off the interior lights. I tried every switch, and shutting and re-shutting the hatch, and slamming the doors. Finally I drove off with the cabin lit up, forgetting to turn my headlights on in the confusion.You went the other way home. Two blocks later I was pulled over into the lumber yard by a very nice policewoman who informed me that not only was my inspection sticker expired, but my license as well

I was unable until some years into our relationship, to get all four items - license, inspection, insurance and registration - current at the same time. My various diseases, although somewhat eradicated in 12 step programs, still lived on inside my car, as if I was unable to let them go entirely. My vehicle was a mobile diorama of the real interior state of my mind, where smoking, and crying, and napping, hoarding, and squalor still lived - and with gusto. I was a tornado - a sweet one - but a tornado nonetheless.

I stepped outside into the dark parking lot and the circle of her flashlight. She said she was supposed to cuff me. Did I have any weapons on me? Pat, pat, pat… Did I have any weapons in my bag? Had I been drinking? I had to surrender the vehicle. I grabbed my laptop and went in her police car to the station. When they concluded I wasn’t drunk or crazy, not really a criminal but just a poor wacko, we chatted amiably about deer sterilization and parking spaces. She saved me from a night in jail and bail. Strangely somehow they let me email you from headquarters, telling you I was in custody for tickets…among other things.

You wrote back: “Wow! That’s dramatic. I am going to bed very shortly. Write to me, and you will have a letter when you wake up.” Even then you weren’t falling for any of my lightly-dusted borderline bullshit.

In the morning I woke to your promised email. You explained, in terms of our growing origin myth, the previous night’s hazards:

“...It’s our interior lights that will tell everyone, and we can’t turn them off. The arc of electricity between us is visible…there is a way we dare to regard ourselves in the other’s presence…allowing something to emerge from shadow into consciousness. I believe this accounts for the exhilaration and terror. This and our juicy chemistry. I will be the headlights. If we do see each other at a meeting, there can be no conversation afterward. None! We will arrange a consistent day/time to see each other…Absolute bliss, let’s have more of that. Tell me when you would like to see me today.”

I waited for you on the sagging front steps of Copeces Lane, smoking a cigarette in the bright winter sun. Melting icicles pinged water onto the wood steps as I pondered being in the middle of this hurricane. I hadn’t told you yet that our bolier had also exploded just after I got home, flooding the basement and filling it with hissing steam. We now had no heat, and my roommates and I spent the wee hours carrying Deb’s father’s wet treasures up the stairs and laying them out in front of the fireplace to dry.

You jumped out of your car with a giant picture book and sat down beside me.

“First of all,” I said, “I have some very good advice for you moving forward. The next time I tell you that I’ve just been arrested -”

Your eyes twinkled. “Are you planning on it?”

“You can’t say - ‘Wow. That sounds dramatic. I’m going to bed.’ ”

“OK,” you laughed.

“At least pretend to be alarmed!”

“What did you want me to do, save you?” you asked, looking at me earnestly.

“Say ‘Oh my God, are you alright!!!?’” I shouted.

“OK. I will,” you smiled again. “Now that that’s settled, can we get to what is very important that I came to show you?”

You opened your giant picture book, Birds Of Prey, onto our laps and flipped through the glossy photos until you found the page. “Here,” you said pointing to the ferocious and gorgeous black raptor, “this is who I am.”

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Do we have a book between us, Nick? I find myself deep in the middle of a chapter and questioning whether any of it is necessary, or even interesting. Are these email exchanges only on fire for you and me? How much of the miniutae should I include when selecting the elements with which to tell our story?

I still heard your voice in my head every day in the first few years after you died.“Do you trust me?’” you would ask. Actually you are probably the only person I do trust, so I always answered ”Yes.” “Then trust me,” you’d say, “There is a much bigger story here.’” For a few hours I was relieved because I wanted to believe that we had a story big enough. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a book between us. Death means almost nothing next to that.

For now we will have to leave it to the editors to decide where to snip us. I’m including all of you that I can. I’ll take us back to Hudson again in freezing January, where tensions were high as we approached the airing for our radio pieces up at WGXC. Suddenly you emailed me with a request. If it wasn’t too late, could I: “delete any allusion to a surgery that you may or may not have had?” You wrote“…at the Last Roundup” (Death) “there won’t be any compartments. Thank God! Living in this world, I exhaust myself. Especially lately! But there’s an edge for you, terrorizing the current version of the self, threatening to smash all of its constructions…”

“Please don’t smash your constructions. I love them. You have all my confidence and you know I will keep yours…You are a man of mysteries,” I answered.

My favorite thing about you was your mercurial and magical spirit. I thought of you as a sacred being in some ways, and I decided that whichever way you had been made, by nature or surgery, was fine with me. I loved you.

I never told you how much it was on my mind in those early days whether or not you had had bottom surgery. It sounded exceptionally complicated to transition from female to male, since it would be easier to remove something as a male than to add something to a female. I knew nothing about how this worked, and I didn’t dare ask you. That would have been complicated even for me. It was obvious that you had your breasts removed, but I hadn’t seen your chest scars yet. Your finely featured face was a wonderful male face, but I don’t know how you got away with that wonderful, crooked, dimpled nose as a woman.

I hadn’t fully considered how vulnerable you must have felt in our interviews. You told me afterwards that you had felt seen and heard, maybe for the first time, but also completely exposed. It must have been exhilarating, but also very frightening to have given me all of yourself and then to have me dash away and slice and dice you at Radio College. All of that sudden openness of love, and then being made accessible to the public airwaves. But you were fearless-est person I’ve ever met.

With your characteristic evasiveness in the interview you told me: “Here’s what I know: Birds don’t fly because they have wings. Birds have wings because they fly. So, when people ask me, ‘How is this possible? How did you get the nerve to do that?’ I say: ‘You have to have the balls first!’ ”

All day your voice rose and fell in patterns on my laptop screen. Our conversation lay topmost on the horizontal tracks, the music track was underneath, and my new narration of the story underneath that. By cutting, splicing, and shifting blocks of sound I was slowly creating a digestible five minute story. The waves of sound were compounding gestures of our conversation. I learned to recognize your audio signature, like a heartbeat on a cardiograph. I learned to recognize what a cough, a breath, or the flatline of a silence looked like.

Besides the whispering of our teachers when students brought their projects over to be evaluated, the large conference room was silent with concentration for most of the day. So it was a very odd moment when I wailed: “I’ll never get this done; I haven’t even gotten to the part about Don Juan!” Our teacher laughed, and shouted to me across the room, “No, Kara! You can’t fit in Carlos Casteneda!”

A was on an adrenaline roller coaster. My stomach did dips each time I heard from you. I still wasn’t sure what you had decided about us during the intense seminar. So you can imagine how a cool email would throw me into a state of terror.

One day you wrote to me about your security concerns in a very dry manner:

“…feelings and thoughts are private and transient, no one is entitled to be informed of them; on the other hand, we are accountable for behavior - there can be no behavior! For the sake of my own privacy and the protection of others’ peace of mind, I wipe my computer, and the server, and hope you will do the same. I trust that we will each find a livable balance point where there can be no guilt.This desperate craziness I am feeling will - MUST - pass.”

“Wipe the server’” ?! You must have learned that from a spy movie. At the time you were practically a Luddite and you could barely operate a desktop computer. I was incensed by your tone. At your house on Pleasant Lane your wife Tracy must have been an evermore present threat in that tiny cottage. You told me later how you felt she listened to all of your calls, and might have been poking around your computer. Suddenly it all felt like a game of alternating endorphin and adrenaline rushes. Your writing was so impersonal and formal. However much we tried to communicate our emotions by email, there were gaps and time lapses.

Back on Planet Radio my heart plummeted over our email exchange. I was sure that I had blown it with you, and I was sure I was a failure at radio and life in general. I went outside to smoke and have a cry, when, who should pass by my bench but the I-Ching girl, smoking a butt and wearing her heavy red lipstick. The carbon monoxide scare was over. She was thinking of moving to Ojai.

By the time I left Camp Hill and made icy walk home that night you were already asleep. I felt completely alone. I wrote back hastily that I was definitely not signing on for any commando mission, where we were paranoid and riddled with fear. It hurts now to see what a cool game I was playing.

You wrote back while I was still asleep:

“No. No. There is a misunderstanding. There is no other place but with you to put what I feel for you. There is no other place…I can only pray. I don’t know what else to do. I trust you with myself and all that pertains to me. I am so sorry if my last e-mail seemed to suggest anything else…only that I’m told the cyberworld is so weird and unprivate…Before the feast of the epiphany, I was grateful just to see you anywhere, my soul so nourished by your existence. I would have lived on that.”

If an email could be a prayer, I took those beautiful lines as one. That sounds to me like the precise moment you decided to tell me directly that you wanted me. That’s the way I understood it at the time. How exciting it was to think that you were the kind of man who would leap, and that I was the kind of woman who would jump, and that we were reckless and deep.

Back in my little room at midnight, after a 13 hour day, I wrote back to ease your mind: “…Some day I will ask you what I said exactly on The Feast of the Epiphany. I was so overcome with fear and sorrow and desire - all at once - I can’t remember it all….” But again you were already in bed.

You wrote back in the morning:

“Are you trying to kill me? I hardly slept last night… I am only too aware now of love as psychosis, and all the dreaming I had with such fine self-discipline intended to refuse…The edge you bring me to is the edge of my shadow. It’s why I was quaking… My shadow is a raptor. And oh! you are his prey. It knows who writes these lines to you! He is ruthless, and I am he. Why do you think I am invoking God in every letter? January 6 is the Feast of the Epiphany, known as “Little Christmas,” and is said to be the day the Wise Men (the astronomers) found Jesus. You told me - eventually - that you loved me on that day. On that day. And then you had to go far from me. You see, we are not alone.”

I wasn’t trying to kill you, only trying to ground myself in the whirlwind. Back then I wasn’t sure of anything. I replied: “…I must know your shadow already and don’t seem to have any fear. I will talk to you more later about how I’ve been feeling about being your prey - thrilled actually, but you know I can be a wild thing.”

Editing audio was a skill I would be adept at with a lot of practice, but I was in no way qualified to perform audio editing on multiple tracks quickly that first week, or believe that it could be done. Finally on our last before we went on the air, the teaching aides magically edited you into a viable piece of audio in half an hour. No big deal after all of my life or death worry.

The next day we made the car trip out to WGXC, the indie radio station, which would have been totally delightful if the heat hadn’t malfunctioned. We huddled in our coats, scarves and hats. Each of us, in turn, went up the iron circular stairs to the booth, put on the headphones, and introduced our pieces on air with the DJ. We could see our breath as we waited downstairs for each story to unfold through the speakers. We were live.

TO BE CONT…

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We didn’t choose each other, Nick. I can see that now. We were chosen by something you called Spirit. “It’s the only thing we are beholden to,” you said, in that way that made it seem as if our lives were extremely important. ‘It’ certainly chose us for each other very insistently, and then had the wit to whisk me immediately up to Hudson for ten days, carrying your audio interviews and transcripts with me. I was headed up to a program called, The Oral History Summer School, quite ironically since it was freezing January.

“She went to Radio College,” you told others who asked, referring to it as reverently as if I had gone to the seminary.

Since you lived on Pleasant Lane a block away from the train, I called you to ask for a ride. I didn’t remember that you refused. I had a whole little scene written out where you groaned as I got into your car, and you told me it was not a good idea, and when I asked you why, you said because you didn’t trust yourself with me, “AT ALL.” We had not even shaken hands at this point, and you didn’t want to risk being in such close quarters. But I know that you did say these things to me, so this scene must have all happened over the phone.

I took the local Long island railroad into New York City and then an Amtrack a few hours north to Hudson, where icy breezes blew off the river that frigid January, and straight up steep Warren street, the main road in town, like a chute. It was hard to keep my feet steady on the sidewalks that had turned into blocks of ice.

You emailed the next day, on Jan. 10: “No message from you. I imagine you thrilled at Radio College, see you scintillate.”

I’m not sure I was scintillating, but at times I felt like I was levitating. Starting at 9 am every day, mesmerizing oral history theory whizzed by at an incredible pace. In between listening sessions we practiced how to conduct interviews, and how to edit audio using the complicated broadcast software, pitching our stories to each other, cutting them down into morsels that might fit into the five allotted minutes. It was heaven, but it was a steep curve for me at fifty three. I know I was comical to the gorgeous, twenty year old Columbia film school graduate editing audio with her left hand, and texting with her right, one ear of her headphones cocked so she could pretend to listen to lectures while she listened to something else.

Our seminar was situated in a beautiful old brick building in a freezing room with a wall of windows. It was fully run by people from a Rudolf Steiner community called Camp Hill, where developmentally disabled adults lived with fully skilled adults in a magical, capitalist-free zone where all food was grown communally, and money and talents were shared. Camp Hill, which was over six hundred acres, was only a half an hour from Hudson. The disabled adults ran our satellite building with gift shop and kitchen where they made us homemade cookies.

While I imagined you sitting quietly in your psychotherapy office in East Hampton, I had taken your audio spirit with me. I was listening to your voice all day on repeat, transcribing, cutting, and shifting pieces of you, trying to do you justice - quite like I am doing now. Even though we had had our epiphany before I left, and we realized that we had fallen in love, nothing was settled. You hadn’t cheated on your wife after all. We had never even touched each other. There was a chance you would wait it out and see if this crazy love thing would blow over. And you didn’t know what I might do, so each email exchange was a testing of the waters.

In reply to your two spare sentences I wrote many back to you: “Tuesday night we went to the weekly free communal dinner with people from the farm. I have a place to go if everything in my life falls apart! If all else fails I love knowing there are places I could end up besides the workhouse. I used to imagine going to this place called Tiger Island in Australia where you could live and raise tigers - obviously. This place actually feels possible. It’s very close to paradise, except that it is about 18 degrees. It strikes me as perfect that I have taken you with me here.”

“If all else fails I can always go to Tiger Island,” was a sentence I had kept in the back of my mind, only half jokingly, for years. It had been my idea of heaven since childhood. After all, as an advance man for one of the chapters of The Shrine Circus, my grandfather’s job was to walk tigers and elephants down the main streets of whichever town they arrived in. He would get arrested and his picture in the paper so people would know the circus was in town, and without paying for any advertising. That still sounds like the perfect job for me.

I must have been sounding you out, playing the cool girl when I told you about Tiger Island and Camp Hill, but I did take their brochure. But I worried that I might be too old and destitute to take care of tiger cubs by the time things fell apart. I wonder now at times why I’m not living out among the big cats, especially since you’ve disappeared. Your death is surely an if all else fails situation.

In reply to my Camp Hill email provocation, you wrote: “Take me in this way everywhere you go, and please don’t go far, or for very long.” Potent words. That one email had enough weight to convince me that we might have a future together.

I’ve has so many near misses with if all else fails. Just five years earlier, when we were only faintly acquainted through AA, I was trying to leave the US and living another trial life in Berlin, as usual on fumes. I was spooked pretty regularly that year by a pretty, silver-haired woman, not much older than myself, who pushed a shopping cart down the streets of Berlin aimlessly. She had dead eyes, and looked like she might be one of the stranded Americans who had taken too many drugs, and gotten stuck there without a way to get home. I crossed the street, terrified, when I saw her coming.

I arrived back in the US in 2011 with my tail between my legs, depressed, penniless, too ashamed and stunned to give the anyone the full details of my re-entry. My friend in Berlin had sent me home with her frequent flyer miles. Back in New York there was simply no work to be had anywhere because of the recession. My oldest friend saved me by asking me to come and work for her. ”You can stay at Jim’s apartment. He just died.” In Jim’s crusty, tiny, walk-up apartment most of his belongings had yellow post-it notes on them: “Save for Sally,” or “For Alex.” The little gold squares glowed in the sun on the one window of the dark apartment with messages. Riddled with anxiety, I struggled to sleep and to wake each grisly morning. I grabbed bus fare from a huge jar of quarters on his dresser, saying: “Thank you, Jim,” and I took the bus uptown to organize, paint, and dog walk for my friend who was moving into her newly purchased penthouse.

From the bus stop on 72nd and Central Park West I had a perfect view of the Dakota building. I’m sure I never told you stories of working for Yoko Ono and her cadre of famous friends when I was in my twenties. I’ve had so many lives, and you were never impressed by celebrity. We were a slap dash construction crew of artists and writers and musicians who needed day jobs, and I was one of three young women on the team, plastering and painting along with the guys. We casually moved huge Frank Stellas in Perry Ellis’ old mansion, and I gasped as I held original Jaques-Henri Lartigue photographs at Jan Wenner’s townhouse. I spent the night Keith Haring died of AIDS by myself in his apartment. Our boss Michael insisted that I was the only one he could trust to move the Basquiats and Warhols, in order to touch up the high gloss, blood red walls in the guest room. It was a strange and heady time.

The Lennons owned two identical apartments, side by side, in the Dakota. How enchanting and soft spoken Yoko was, and how impeccable. Before we entered her all-white apartment we had to remove our shoes and even make sure our paint drop cloths had just been freshly laundered. But in the play apartment, which was for music and art projects, we were never so awed in our lives as when we moved actual Beatles gold records from the paint splattered walls. We were re-plastering them in deep plum, to match the specially dyed carpets and Balinese furniture the young Sean Lennon requested for his new apartment. I am stunned that I never thought of how painful it must have been for Yoko to let that apartment go to her son. To cover over the vestiges of her husband in the old plaster, in the day-glow orange and green and yellow splatters of paint on the walls and electric pianos. Imagine the history that we covered over. It took me over a year just to empty your closet after you died!

Following John Lennon’s death many years prior, the vast underground Dakota parking garage where we accessed the service elevator, filled slowly with bouquets of condolence from all over the world. Yoko called our boss, Michael, in tears: “There are thousands of flowers dying underneath me. I have no idea what to do.” I’ve never heard anyone else tell that small strange story of how Michael rounded up everyone he knew with trucks or vans, to collect and drive the flowers to hospitals and old age homes before they wilted and died.

Looking up from the bus stop thirty odd years later, extremely depressed and anxious, and nearly suicidal at being so adrift, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder who had the bigger ego - Yoko or me? Since I was sure that I belonged up in her pristine apartment with white walls, carpet, and piano overlooking the park, instead of down at the bus stop, and I was pretty sure she never even questioned it herself, I concluded that her ego was probably normal, and that mine was the one that was way out of whack. We couldn’t all live in the Dakota, but why were others like my friend capable of moving their lives forward, while I was stealing quarters from a dead man?

One day my friend asked me to use a shopping cart she had found on the street. I was to use it to traipse small things between her old apartment and her new one a few blocks away. One of the wheels was broken, which made me feel like more of a spectacle trying to get it up over curbs. After two trips I was so traumatized by enacting what I thought was my future as a bag lady that I ended up crying on a bench in a small park. I had to tell my oldest friend that I couldn’t push her belongings in a shopping cart because it felt too close to what I might become. But there was no way for her to comprehend it. When she ‘ran out’ of money she had to dip into her investment accounts, or the family inheritance. When I told her I needed to use Jim’s change for bus fare, she must have thought it was a charming exaggeration.

I tell you all of this because I was desperate enough by then to cross the threshold of Debtors Anonymous. It was the only place in the world that could have sorted any of this out for me. And it was the the place you and I came to know each other so intimately. And it was in that Yule room of the Presbyterian church where we fell in love at our DA meetings over the next three years. That’s where spirit caught us.

And miraculously, only four years later, I was sitting in a very cold room at the back of Camp Hill, in a class of fifteen oral history students in a large V-shape of desks with our silver Macbooks under fluorescent lights, and another altogether new life was beginning. And of course the whole experience was heightened a few notches by the constant adrenaline rush of being newly in love. I didn’t know yet that you would save my life. I didn’t know it would turn out to be my real life, the thing I had waited for for so long.

In deep concentration, hours and days flew by at Camp Hill, in which we huddled on the floor in our coats and scarves with our backs against the walls, and at other times lay sprawled on the floor. We only left the room to collect food. Somehow the other students, sitting underneath their professional headphones, were cutting and pasting sound files seamlessly into radio stories, while I became more and more agonized by what I was having to cut out. Do you see what I was up against? During the day through my headphones, and at night as I walked to my room in Hudson in the dark, your voice played in my head. I forgoed dinners with the others, working in a fever to finish the transcription of your words on tape, rewinding our conversation hundreds of times to catch each nuance. Trying to whittle you down into manageable bites was impossible. You were, and are, too big a story for me to tie up neatly.

I didn’t know if I had the stamina to withstand the waves of bliss - unmoored and wild after being damned up for six years - that would periodically wash over me lying in the twin bed in my rented room. Obviously a son or daughter’s, who had grown and left home, and had left the white chalk drawings of the cosmos on the chalkboard walls. I felt a million light years away from East Hampton.

I wrote to the ‘you’ I imagined alone in your office on Pleasant Lane, updating you on our progress through our ‘paper cut’ and then our ‘meatball draft’, new terms I knew you would enjoy. But I expressed doubt that any woman could live on your two-sentence emails alone. You replied with more than a few cryptic sentences - finally.

Nick: “Several lines of nourishment to go with your ‘meatball’: For my last birthday, I was given a visit to a psychic… I think you should hear the tape he gave me…He said impossible things to me, as does the feeling I have for you. The same things, in fact…” You advised us to stay out of drama, since our circumstances were no mistake, but were part of the gift, and we should use it to refine ourselves: “...instead of plunging into dreams, as surely I have done so many foolish times before…This is certainly a terrifying edge that I could fall off of, causing incalculable harm to self and others. Love has not come for that, but for transformation, which we both have beckoned. I pray a breathless ‘thank you’.”

Look at how hard you were trying to impress me. Our email personas were like nineteenth century poets who knew our correspondence would be published for posterity. Surprising how much we were referring to ’God’ when neither of us had a relationship with anything labeled that way. I suppose we were used to the verbiage of our 12 Step programs, where the word was a place-holder, a stand-in for ‘universe’ or ‘spirit’.

I replied: “I love you.” I really don’t remember being that brief, or that brave.

I couldn’t wait to tell you about the hip Hudson girl who sat next to me outside of Camp Hill one day. She wore outrageous red lipstick and threw the I-ching on the sidewalk, noting results on her I-phone, while a cigarette dangled from her lips. I inquired as we smoked and watched the last sliver of afternoon sun fall quickly down the brick buildings on the coldest day of the year. She told me might have died in her sleep, high carbon monoxide levels, and sudden evacuation. She was staying with a man who was much too much in love with her for her to be able to feel it. That’s why she was throwing the I-ching. To decide whether to stay or to go. Carbon monoxide, near-death, evacuation, and love? Maybe she should see the thing out, I suggested. Just last week I told her that I had interviewed my best friend only to realize when I listened back to our interviews that we were totally in love with each other.

Only you could have understood my new, curiously relevant little adventure. You and I were throwing the dice as well. I ask myself daily now what in the world you saw in me. But see this? My bravery is one reason that I can accept with pleasure.

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The Whole Enchilada:

You excuse yourself from our interview to address bodily needs, and I push pause on my recorder. We’ve been talking happily for over an hour. “Please don’t judge me for my bathroom,” I say, as you head out my bedroom door into the hall. Your bathroom on Pleasant Lane is always spotless and I wonder what you will think of the one I share here on Copeces Lane.

You stop. Your eyes are suddenly deeper front to back.“If only you knew what I really think about you,” you say carefully. It’s an absolutely perfect exit line.

Like the night you turned as you were leaving our DA meeting. You were slowed down just the same way, as if in a dream. “You are very, very important to me,” you said. This was another one of a hundred missed opportunities when you and I could have agreed to inhabit the same wavelength. One of the times we will ask ourselves about later, when one or the other glances away just in time, or laughs, or manages a quick comeback. This time it’s me who brushes off your intensity and makes light of it.

“Oh no! Is it bad?” I ask, laughing, before you slip out the door.

When you return you are business as usual again: “So, I want to say something about the period of time when I was making the decision.” You wipe your damp hands on the starched handkerchief you keep in the breast pocket of your jacket. “I’m elongating it because - I seem to remember it as a moment, but it wasn’t a moment,” you say.

I watch you fold the small cloth back at its creases and return it to your coat hanging over the back of the chair. I watch your exquisite suchness in all of your affairs, even such small ones you perform meticulously. I couldn’t see then that you also had your own orchestration of our interview. Although you are flexible enough to turn corners and follow me down alleyways, you always return me to the main theme whenever we get off track.

It was required that I have, for lack of a better word - permission - from a psychiatrist before any medical doctor would prescribe hormones or perform surgery,” you tell me bluntly. “So, the psychiatrist’s job was to check how crazy I was really, and whether this was really indicated. And by the way he said when he first met me - that was it.” You look at me to punctuate what might be misunderstood. “He had made his call.”

I nod. I may have finally learned my lesson about interrupting the flow of your story.

“Even so, I wondered if I were putting something over on him, like I thought - I can’t really be one of those people, can I?”

It hurts to hear you speak this way about your tribe. But I understand. So much of our enthusiasm for major leaps involves pretending. And it feels awkward and silly. Praying ourselves forward in time, making a picture we can step into. I feel this way now about my study of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism. Am I going to be one of those people in a saffron robe with a shaved head? It sounds ludicrous and pretentious even to say it. Besides, I look awful in mustard yellow, and I can’t bear either the mountains or the cold.

“But here’s the thing,” you continue. “I wanted to talk about the either/or nature of what I was doing. I was in one category, and what was up for discussion was moving into the other category. And I asked him whether it wouldn’t be possible to do this sort of thing incrementally. And I would say when, you know? Like when they’re pouring the milk into your glass and you say - That’s it! Good!”

“Do I have to choose the whole enchilada at the beginning?” I chime in ridiculously.

You are on a roll and don’t pay any attention.“Because I didn’t even know what the whole thing was. How could I know what that was? Sort of like the sober thing. What is sober? I don’t know. Like - how male do I need to be? Which is still a real question to me,” you say.

“Right,” I agree. I hadn’t considered how considered a choice it would be, having to switch categories entirely.

“So, I said to the therapist: My spirit doesn’t identify one way or the other, as male or female at all particularly. But my being in the world cannot tolerate being female. And it’s not alone with myself, it’s immediately what is reflected in the eyes of another person.”

“Hun,” I pause here to really think about what you are telling me. I haven’t ever heard this before.

“The recognition of me as female - which is by the way the first recognition. The instant someone has a baby, the instant - what is the first question? Gender is the first category people put each other into. If you’re a human being it’s the first thing that registers. So, seeing that registration occur was unbearable to me.”

“No kidding? But then, after that, when you got to know people, and that registration didn’t occur every time -”

“But of course it did!”

“Every time?” I ask incredulously.

“But of course. It’s permanent once it’s been made,” you say with intensity.

It’s startling to think of being misunderstood this way, and having a secret gnawing away of your integrity. If constant mis-apprehension is occurring then what grounds you in yourself? What stops you from playing the part to the absolute hilt? What stops you from being a liar by default? I have always liked being mis-apprehended. I like being in-between. It has always been great fun to watch people figure out what category to put me into, not gender-wise, but sexual preference, yes. Not fitting into a neat box has been exciting.

“I know people who have known me most of my life - I don’t know how they do this, I really don’t - but they have never made a pronoun slip in my presence. When I told them this was happening, and this was my name, they never made a mistake going forward. Those are exceptional people.”

I feel incredibly privileged to be sitting next to you. gathering all this detailed information. I love explanations better than anything. You don’t chastise me for being so naive. You protect my curiosity.

“But let me ask you this,” I venture. “So there’s the period they call transition and you make the decision that this is going to happen. But this is a huge. It’s like a year-long thing -”

“A year?!” You protest loudly. “Testosterone takes seven to ten years to fully transform a person!”

“Oh…” I can’t believe how ignorant I am of the process at the time.

“Look at boys. Watch them grow. That’s how long it takes. There’s no speeding it up.”

“But how could you possibly tolerate change going on for that long?!” I practically scream.

“At forty,” you smile.

“You know - I want those shoes, and I want the expedited shipping - I want them here yesterday!” I say, laughing and making you laugh.

“And I wanted to be able to sing like Dean Martin! That was my dearest thing.”

“But...were you a singer?” I ask.

“Never.”

I laugh and topple backward on the couch, so pleased at your comedic timing. I try and catch my breath. “If this were really a magical world I would transform into a singer, instead of changing my gender. Who cares? I’d just say - transform me into Beyonce.” Obviously I would no longer choose Beyonce from among the thousands. Maybe it would be Bjork. I already look like her.

There is a balancing act going on between us. We equalize each other’s energy. We probe and explain and then burst the bubble with humor. Then we start all over again. We are playing, and that takes trust developed over time.

“Then how long - did it really take seven years to look unlike she?” I ask.

“I should have brought my passport photo that was taken very early in my transformation. I would have the experience in the early couple of years of, say, going in to buy a cup of coffee and being called Sir, and then going into a store for a newspaper and being called Ma’am. That’s what it was like for a long time. I was also, and of course continue to be, fine boned. Narrow-built, esthenic, if not ethereal.”

“What’s esthenic?” God, how you love obscure words!

“Very slight musculature. Narrow. I weighed maybe 125 pounds, soaking wet, as they say.”

“Drunk as a skunk.”

“Well no, when I was drinking I weighed quite a bit less. But you know, turning someone of that body type into someone who registers as male on first glance takes quite a bit.”

“Did you talk about what was going on in AA meetings?” I ask.

“The psychiatrist said you have to tell everyone what your name is. He sort of goaded me into what the next step was. This was very early, before hormones, I was binding my chest for about a year.”

“The therapist said you need to go into AA and say this is my new name?” My anxiety is rising at the thought of it.

“Well, because I had made clear to him that that was my community. I went into the city a few times for a support group at the gay and lesbian center and it became immediately painful to me to walk in under the sign, being neither gay nor lesbian. I didn’t meet anyone there who was interesting to me. And I already had a support group. Alcoholics Anonymous. He was just saying - you have to now tell people your name.”

“So, you have to name yourself - again.”

“Yes. And to say this is why.”

“You said that in an AA meeting?!”

“Yes!”

“Whoa…”

I am astonished, not just at the bravery of saying this in a meeting, but in an AA group twenty years ago. Sometimes people walk out if you even mention drugs in a meeting. The old timers can be quite judgemental, and East Hampton, although cosmopolitan in the summer, can be a downright backwater.

“I put my hand up and said - blah, blah, blah, and I’m an alcoholic. Everyone looks at me because I’m not saying the name I said the day before, and I had to tell them why. Many people came up to me and embraced me, and one person out in the parking lot said: ‘So! Do you want us to start calling you He?’ It was very touching. I wasn’t ready for that. I was overwhelmed at the honor! Of the pronoun. I did not expect that from lesbians. I don’t think all of them felt good about what I was doing, but I never felt comfortable with them.”

“Even though you were them?”

“But I wasn’t. By definition I was a female-bodied person who was attracted to women, but I didn’t feel like I ever belonged in groups of them. It felt very silly to sit with these people since our spirits were so different. I didn’t want to be with those people. What did I have in common with them?”

To Be Cont.

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The farther away in time our story recedes, the more I see how simple and final it was. Stop - the problem has been solved - no more rowing against the stream - you have found it - you are here. When we finally realized that we had fallen in love with each other we both knew it wasn’t just that we felt important to each other, but we felt that our combination was important for some greater purpose. Perhaps that’s why we retold each other our origin story nearly every day in those first winter months, maybe even for the whole first burning year; like children who ask every night to hear the same story over again, neither of us ever got tired of unspooling our miracle. And each time one of us told it, the other would probe the plot points:

“Did you know when you stood in the doorway?”

“What about the time I was living over the garage?”

“You mean the time you forced me to watch Hedwig And The Angry Inch at movie night?!”

“How about when your wife asked you point blank..?”

“I think it was on the tip of my tongue in your bathroom…”

“I knew you were hypnotizing me!”

And of course you were a trained hypnotist so it’s possible that you did hypnotize me. I am like all the other crazy deluded broads who have tried to talk to their dear departed after death. But, I’m not trying to get a phone line where I can keep you, and speak to you whenever the table thumps. It’s true that I believe that I am being led, but I am not at all sure by whom, or if there is one at all. I am just following the signs.

I need to know what is the piece of you that is still traversing from Time, to No Time, to Time, and back again, and maybe swooping in and out. I am still reading your lifetime of saved letters in order to understand. Who or what holds the vital piece of you? Into which horcruxes have you squirreled away your gold? The final element distilled down in alchemical chambers until nothing extraneous is left. Where is the vital spark of you?

I’m looking in the past for you, in the files you saved in folders by year. Your childhood notes home are some of the most precious things I have ever found. How is it possible that they should not find their way out of a box? Your voice as Jennifer is so loud and true. That vital essence never left you through all of your name and gender alterations.

So I have made the rash decision to write here in your voice. But I write in your voice explaining your former self back to me. I write as Nicholas to Kara about Jennifer. I have put you here in our book. Just so there’s no confusion.

Jennifer/Nicholas:

”By the summer of 1965 when I had just turned eleven, my parents, hoping for quality time alone, sent me off to Camp Sacajawea in New Jersey for the month of June followed by a prolonged visit to my less-than-favorite grandmother’s house at the beach in East Hampton for the rest of the season; they were trying, as they had been for a good deal of my childhood, to salvage their marriage, and this year was their last ditch effort before final separation. My role, as I perceived it then, was to valiantly thwart their efforts at a life without me as the linchpin in the center (a spot they themselves had put me by the way, since both of them needed surrogate partners).

“ ‘Dear Mama & Daddy, I hate this camp. I want to come home. They lied to us. They said we were going to have a flood, but it was a SURVIVAL TEST — And we have to go to bed at 9:30 or 10:00. I am dead on my feet by then. And they read your postcards and send them back if you say you don’t like camp. Write me a letter a day please...’ ”

In my letters home to New Jersey I cajoled, complained, and sometimes threatened, all to no avail. I must have hoped to make it impossible for them to have a moment of peace, writing to them daily, complaining eloquently about the shoddy conditions in which I was forced to live. As a ploy I sent pressed flowers in my next letter home, explaining that we had to go swimming in the rain, that I had to eat ghastly white bread, (forbidden at home) and that they served ‘garbagey’ food.

‘..​AND we have to clean up the crummy mess hall and the latrine and rake the grass, AND WE PAID! As if it were some great honor or something. I owe you a hello punch and a goodbye one, Love, Huckleberry.’

No-one came to my rescue however. Not for any of my name change iterations. In my letters home from Grammy Klem’s that July I alternated between aloof, injured, and desperate:

‘Dear you guys: Hello. Grammy insists that I say something. O.K. I did. P.S. I knew you would be simply overjoyed to hear from me.’

I was aghast at our family’s level of poverty, (Grammy Klem was a notch below even us) and when asked for shampoo she produced only an old dried up tube of Prell. I wrote to my mother in desperation:​

‘PLEASE SEND a care package!!! This is what to include: shampoo, toothpaste, 2 allowances (June & July), (if you can), curlers (the little kind), and anything else you can think of...’

I often signed my letters, ‘Your independent and responsible daughter,’ but then resorted to whining to my father privately:

‘“To: The Missed, 39 Fordham Rd, Somerset, NJ, ​PRIVATE:​ Dear Daddy, I did my hair 2wice by myself and Grammy didn’t even say ‘good’. And I made up a new word besides ‘gigantisized’. It is ‘putridified’. Grammy said ‘uhum’. She doesn’t care. Come quick. I lose because I miss you and Mom. I would brush my teeth with baking soda but Grammy’s tastes like soap. Grammy lets me go to bed at 10:00 and that means she doesn’t care. I would rather go to bed at 7:30 if somebody would care. Love, Peach.’

No car home arrived. By the start of the school year In New Jersey I had found the voice I used for much of the rest of my life, the voice of the betrayed, the heartsick, the vengeful, and perhaps the greatest example comes in the form of a note I wrote to a Mister Nicholas Peters that same year, on card stationary, sealed in a perfect little envelope with delicate purple flowers:

‘My dear Mr. Peters, Perhaps you have never loved anything in your life. I have. If you did, you certainly don’t make it apparent. I loved my cat, and won’t have people treading on her grave. I would appreciate it if you would not interfere while I am discouraging certain parties from bestowing this elegant gift of a footprint. Very disrespectfully yours, Jennifer Grimshaw.’

This was stamped and had definitely been mailed, and yet you found it in the cardboard box of files in my possessions, so I will have to conclude that Mr. Peters (whom I don’t remember) must have brought it back to my mother who could see the inherent historical value in saving this document of me at an age when I was still vacillating between writing letters to ‘Daddy’ from camp, and holding hands with a girl that I dared to say ‘Lesbian’ with me without blushing - the exact age of transition for me from merely precocious to ferocious.

Only six months later, after my parents’ separation, I followed my father into the kitchen in his apartment in Vermont where he was pouring shots for himself and a friend, and I put my own glass down on the table. Demands upon my parents to be reasonable had no effect, but unreasonable demands were sometimes met, by my father. After all, this is the man who would tie me and my sled to the back of the car in the winter ice, or set me on the hood and drive me over the bumpy dirt roads in summer, yelling at me out the window to let go of the windshield wipers. So he gave me a shot, on condition I swallow it whole immediately and never tell my mother. Certainly. I swallowed it whole, would never tell my mother, and held out my shot glass for another. No such luck.”

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I am crying so hard that I leave my senses. Like a child spent from a tantrum whose body still performs the convulsive motions, my body takes over. I am hyperventilating and my stomach is palpating. I give your old medicine cabinet all of my weight and put my hot forehead against the cool mirror above the sink. I am too exhausted to resist anything. I could fall asleep in this position.

With my head against the glass I open my eyes and look directly in. Something I may not have done since getting sober twenty-two years ago. At first it is very dark in there. And then there is something - maybe only a glint of light - but suddenly it’s clear. You are in the eyes looking, Nick. I am watching you watching me back from behind the glass. I gasp. It is genius. To stow yourself away in such an unlikely place as my own gaze. The realization is too sudden. Now fear leaps directly into my stomach, scrambling my systems, telling me to run. But I’m certain I must stay absolutely still. I resolve to let go and fall into the dark wells of my eyes, and through the looking glass.

Grief is an hallucinogen. Forms shift. I let go even farther and our eyes switch places on the mirror face. One moment we are a cyclops. Then four eyes in a moving Picasso. And fear is waiting at the edges, like birds wanting to swoop. My head nearly explodes, but I keep myself from flying apart. Maybe what I do is fall together. Even when it is winging and dizzying I hold the gaze into the pupils, and I slide through. I see my eyes, cheeks, tears, skin, nose, lips, peripherally fuzzily. They are all pieces you love. All that urgent falling in love. It is happening again in the mirror.

Now I move my head slowly away from the mirror and look again. This is not abstract. There is no mistake. I know what I “see.” I am you from behind the glass looking directly into me. It hurts. It burns. I do not move away. I say a breathy “Wooooowww…” as I slide through the mirror. I have been looking in the light, but you are inside. I have found you gazing straight back through me. You have been here all along, and it only takes a millimeter’s shift of the eye.

But it is too big for me to hold any longer. Maybe it is too small and fleeting for you? I don’t know who lets go first. It’s only later that I distill this down into words, which seems blasphemous to me, Nick. To put this into words: that it’s not my job to find you. But to carry you, like we all carry time, since we are made of it. That to recognize you I only have to make myself available to be found. That you’ll find me when you’re able. If only I can remember that this is everything. This is love. It is always here. There is nowhere else to look.

The battered stack of your Carlos Castaneda paperbacks sits on the cottage bookshelf now. The ones we read to each other out loud, in no particular oder, while we cooked, while you gardened. Lying head to head on the living room carpet at night. Passages you highlighted through the years - done once in yellow, very important parts gone over again in pink, and super ultimate pieces of information underscored a third time in orange - or have I got it backwards? I re-read them according to your colored maps. How wonderful of you to leave so many clues.

Just today in Castaneda’s The Art Of Dreaming I open randomly to a quote: “To seek freedom is the only driving force I know,” Don Juan tells Carlos. “Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.”

“There you are,” I’ll say each time that I discover you, hidden and safe. That the flame of you is intact.

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Leaving Pleasant Lane:

“One golden afternoon our first February on my bed. This might be our first day of full body contact.We have all our clothes on, except shoes. I unlace yours and place them side by side under the bed. We pull sheets up over our heads like a tent. Sunlight filters through, the white cotton falls, embracing us, blurring middle-aged creases and imperfections. We don’t to worry about how our naked bodies look, so we can relax.

We will savor the early days. There will be rules. We’re sober people, and we won’t be “spending” ourselves too soon. We’ll show ourselves in stages, and you’ll decide when it’s time for the next reveal. You have so much more at stake in the strip-tease. At any juncture you might startle me out of my trance with the reality of your trans body. It sounds very adult, but it only makes things steamier.

Your buttons are hard to undo, always too snug for their eyelets, since you replace the plastic ones with mother-of-pearl. For you it’s all in the details. I feel the heat of your body as unbutton your shirt and reach inside the starched cotton. I see the scars on your chest for the first time. Your top surgery was fifteen years ago, but it looks like it might still hurt. I touch around them lightly, transmitting goosebumps. When you tell me it’s alright, I trace the still shiny, pink skin of the scars.

You don’t know for sure whether I am all in or not, and you haven’t told me yet what I might find below your belt. But I am as fascinated with your repairs, deletions, and possible additions, as I am with the intricacies of your mind. Your jeans are stiff, ironed. I feel a hardness pushing against me as we roll around, but I don’t truly know. How crazy that I still don’t know what you have in your pants?

I don’t know if this was the day you tell me you did not have bottom surgery. I only know we are lying side by side in the dark when you explain how broken you are, and how complex the operation is from female to male. They might have used parts of your inner thigh to fashion into a penis, but it might have looked strange and you might never have been able to have an orgasm, so it just wasn’t worth the risk.

I think I say - offhandedly - that penises aren’t the most important things to me anyway. I don’t want you to know I am scared. I don’t want any expression of regret on my face, even in the darkened room. Maybe we’re looking up at the ceiling, and only taking small glances at each other, but I’m not sure that’s right. Besides, there’s no turning back. I have decided to take you any way you are sliced.

A few months after you die I open the drawers under your side of our bed and find your envelopes, staples, ink, and stacks of yellow post-its. I flip through a yellow square, inhaling chemicals. Small scalpels of panic sear my veins. I had bargained on my knees with God in this attic. Nothing I did could keep you here, but these post-its are solid as ever.

The drawer by your nightstand has heavy white cord-lengths of our heated mattress pad that made winter in the attic bearable. I unroll a smaller white heating pad and gasp. Your most secret silicone part, an extension you warmed to body temperature. This is secret beyond secret. I was only allowed to see it when it was attached to your body. My chest actually heaves as I gasp for breath. These pieces left behind are articulations of your body. Articulates to my inticulates.

If you hadn’t donated yourself to science I could have kept your extensions with you. But it would have made an embarrassing cremation. I wrap them back up safely with your Christmas things for a time in the future when I might know how to relate to them. Maybe as if they are souvenirs, like others save cufflinks, or wooden legs, or medals from war.

The joke from Absolutely Fabulous is that when women with breast implants die they will only leave silicone for archeologists to find. Thousands of years after their bodies have decomposed, these lumps will remain.

I sit on the floor and shake with anger and tears. Our matter isn’t permanent in form. Nothing stays. But it’s the good news/bad news thing, since nothing ever goes away either. Every particle returned and returned again. The world, empty of itself as itself, but full of the clear stuff of renewal. It’s the only place to find you.”

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I’m surprised that I was this fearless. I was nervous to play back our interviews, and to have to hear my own voice. But I only had a few days to transcribe them before my oral history seminar began, so I had to dive in.

“Yikes. What goes on here?” you wrote back. “It’s clear, as you said recently, that the conversation will never be over.”

Strange things were happening between us and around us. I wrote back to you the following morning: “Yikes is right! At Midnight last night my 'opponent’ locked my car with the engine running, and my keys, purse and phone inside.”

While I waited for the emergency locksmith I decided to do something sensible like meditate at 1:30 AM. But when I tried to settle cross-legged on my roommate’s bamboo Papasan chair, I told you: “The top bowl sprung off the base, and I landed in the Christmas tree! This seems hilarious right now.”

In our DA work together we had named our alter egos, or nemeses, or opponents as don Juan called them. Mine was Wednesday Addams from the Addams family, who showed up with her braids and black scowl to cause trouble when she felt left out. As an exercise I drew a picture of her and told her that I wouldn’t leave her behind as I got healthier in my 12 step programs. After all, she must have saved my life, and my ass, countless times as a child. It only made sense that she would feel threatened when big changes were afoot. Locking my belongings in my car, and bouncing me off the chair into the Christmas tree were just the prelude.

“What a poltergeist that Wednesday Addams is!” you replied. “She must be enjoying herself greatly.”

Only three days later, on January 6th, the moon was full, which always makes me a bit of a witch. During the brief span since our last exchange I had transcribed the rest of our interviews. I don’t know the precise point as an observer that I heard what changed me. Just standing outside of our conversations shifted me. Hearing us, so beautiful and easy together on the tape, was a revelation and I heard what I hadn’t heard before. From one second to the next we were in love with each other. Our territorial disputes on tape were obviously foreplay. It was so obvious that it was outright embarrassing. Terrifying even. I realized that anyone observing us must have known.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, shutting the player down. I jumped up from the couch and moved around the room like a chicken scratching in the dirt. “No, no, no, no, no, no!”

What had you and I been playing at, pretending not to notice that we were falling in love? And doing it so well that we believed our own bullshit. It had to be immediately shut down, squashed, hidden until it passed. I was the one who knew what was happening, so I had to be the one to bury it. I would put a halt to our interviews, and I would limit my exposure to you and Tracy - definitely no more Harry Potter movie nights at your house.

I didn’t turn on the light in my bedroom when you called later that night. I didn’t want for anything to come to light, or for time to move forward. I let you leave a message, and after a reasonable time I left you a message in return. I used my blandest voice: The interview was done. I had all I needed. I thanked you.

When you called back I still couldn’t answer. I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark, as if I was nowhere, and no causality could occur. But you must have called again, because before I knew it you were insisting I tell you what had changed between us. Nothing. What was wrong? Nothing. Why weren’t we going to have the third interview? You prodded me until I was out of self control. You simply wouldn’t let me disappear into the phone.

“Don’t you know what’s happening?!” I finally shrieked into the phone. It was obvious, I told you. And it was awful. And it was right there on the tape! It was embarrassing. And surely everyone else must know, including your wife.

I didn’t know the moon was full, or that January sixth was Little Christmas. I didn’t know there was such a thing, or that it was also known as The Epiphany.

You backpedaled, if I remember correctly. “If only I wasn’t married,” or “If only I were a younger man…” you said, trailing off into the phone.

I panicked in that dark room. I hung my head down and started to cry. It was all happening again. I was in love with a married man.

“Oh, dear girl, why are you crying?” you asked.

“I’m crying because I can’t believe how much it is going to hurt for you to have to let me go!”

That must be one of the craziest sentences I’ve ever heard come out of my mouth. It didn’t feel like me talking. I had taken whatever truth serum the moon and Miss Adams had injected me with.

I was speaking straight from the future. How did I know that you would really have to let me go five years later? That I would be kneeling at your side in the dark room at Mount Sinai Hospital? I would lock eyes with you and tell you it was OK that you had to go, and that I would take care of things here on the ground while you traveled on.

After we hung up I wept even harder. My sobs so loud they roused my perpetually stoned roommate. She hugged me close in the echoing bathroom, where I had spent so many nights in the old blue bathtub reading and rereading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, not yet realizing that things were also falling together, precisely and divinely.

Hours later when I checked my email, there were three sentences waiting from you: “You are right. I am stupid. And everything you said is true.” How simple and quick your admission was. I was too busy howling in the dark to find your message.

“You really are the smartest person I know,” I wrote back hours later, after you had long been in bed. “Maybe I will be able to stand this in a little bit. I just haven’t felt anything this powerful in a long time. It’s scary.”

The next morning your email arrived with the heading: “ALIVE.”

I’ve always taken this to mean that you survived the long night of waiting for my response to your message. But now I can see that you were clearly telling me that you had been resurrected yet again from the deadness that was choking your spirit. You are telling me that you feel alive again because we have admitted the truth.

“I would say so many things to you,” you continued, “but any step being forward now, this matter can only be referred, and referred, and referred to God, asking good for all concerned. It’s all true; you are not alone in this.”

“Surprise me is a powerful prayer,” I replied.

Surprise me had been your go-to affirmation in our DA meetings, which we recited in the round at the end of every meeting. It was so dangerously sexy to tell God to bring it on. It was a level of bravery that I could not or would not dare to indulge in.

“My body is rebelling,” I wrote. “I can’t yet find a place to fit something this big. We are powerful people and there is combustion. Just so you know there is someone who wants to see all of it in you, even what’s in the bag. I’m not capable of letting you go, so somehow I must rearrange my soul. Maybe it’s time. On a lighter note: Perhaps you and I and Tracy and Richard could move to a small island in Greece and practice free love and organic farming.”

“I would be OK with organic farming,” you replied, hilariously.

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With your paid subscription you also get access to our Writers Daily Dive, which is a weekly writing group on Zoom where we chat and then write in silence. Fridays we read from works in progress.

Monday-Friday 1:00-2:00, EST on Zoom: 863 8204 1826, Pass: dailydive

Here’s the latest chapter from our book, A Suitable Vessel For Magic:

I yelled out rather pointedly: “Nick, just come and get me in my dream!”

At 5:17 the following morning I let out a long, high, howl, which started in the dream and echoed through the real house. I was going swiftly up the back steps to the deck in the dream when a hand reached up out of the darkness. Beneath the bushy plants on the right side a firm and sudden electric grip on my wrist jolted me. It had weight. It felt like it could pull me down into the dark.

“Noooooo!!!!!” I yelled out.

It wasn’t really a full word, but more of a long, piercing whoop. Just the kind of sound I made that delighted you and that you learned to elicit by waiting around corners in the house to jump out and scare me. I knew I hadn’t become lucid in my dream. It was too startling, but I was thrilled that you made a grab for me. I hope you were trying to catch me as I ran by, to say: “Wake up, you’re dreaming!” The next time you invite me down I promise I will at least pause and consider it.

What a tightrope it must be for you, coming from a timeless place, calibrating coordinates, not knowing how much pressure to use - too tight, too loose, too quick, too heavy - to make your best grab and get the best whoop. I knew it was your hand when I woke up because this was exactly the way you used to grab me on the way to the waxing salon in the mall. This grab signaled the beginning of one of our most ridiculous rituals.

I wanted to have my legs waxed and you agreed to pay for it under the condition that I take everything off - the full Brazilian. Thinking about it now I can see some readers might find this outrageous. But they don’t know how I was teased at school for the hair on my arms, and the shame I had around any hair at all on my body. So I pretended that this was an onerous and painful fetishistic request on your part - and it was - and you pretended you were making me do it. Of course I like being waxed, and I wanted you to pay for it. Afterward you rewarded me with a treat. It might be a meal out, or even better a shopping trip next door to TJ Maxx.

But I was startled the first time we got out of the car and started walking towards the salon and you grabbed my wrist. With your thumb and forefinger first, like a hard pinch, and then your other fingers slowly tightened around my wrist bone. I remember exactly how very precise and firm, as if you were measuring me for something. It was weird and frightening to be assessed in this way.

“Ow!” I squealed, eliciting a slow smile from you, although you wouldn’t look at me.

Then with a tug of pressure you would pull me closer, like a trainer might do to a horse, or a dog on a leash. Were we in one of Castaneda’s lucid dream puzzles, and were you frightening me to move me to some other realm? I tried to pull myself out of your grip, but then silently consented. Something was different about you. Something told me this was important. I let you lead me across the parking lot to Angel Tips Nails with your vice-grip on my wrist, like you were my sugar daddy. You wanted the people at the salon to know that it was you who were paying for my shearing. It seems so crazy now. But I knew how much it delighted and excited you, so I let you play out your hyper-male fantasy in this small way. In fact I found it endearing, which says a lot about how much I loved you, and how crazy I am.

I always managed to pull out of your grip in the nick of time as we entered the frosted doors of the salon. You did the talking at the front desk. You wanted the Korean gentleman to know that everything must be removed, from the toes, up the legs, to the full Brazilian, and that only Sara would do. She was thorough and you would request her. After the man gave his knowing smirk we sat side by side, ridiculously silent in the middle of the loud noise of the room, on low black leather couches waiting for Sara to usher me to the waxing cubicles in the back. I felt you watching as we went single-file, past giant gray naugahyde thrones, where Hamptons women sat thumbing magazines, while others squatted on low rolling stools speaking Korean, attending to the feet in the bubbling foot baths.

When Sarah finished forty-five minutes later you returned and paid at the counter in cash with a generous tip for Sara. The Korean gentleman smiled deeply and decorously bowed his head, as if you and he had rehearsed this little play.

When we got back to your car you insisted I retell the story of the torture I had endured at the hands of Sara. Most especially the horror of having to throw each of my legs up over my shoulder so that she could get to all the nooks and crannies.

“You are very brave,” you said, always freshly delighting me. “Very very brave.”

“I know!” I replied, astonished at the truth of the statement.

“You can show me when we get home.”

With your subscription you also get access to our Writers Daily Dive, which is a weekly writing group on Zoom where we chat and then write in silence. Fridays we read from works in progress.

Monday-Friday 1:00-2:00, EST on Zoom: 863 8204 1826, Pass: dailydive

You were wearing our soft brown terrycloth robe. Its wide neck hung open, showing how pink your skin was. I can’t remember if this is the same clinical trial drug that made you go into anaphylactic shock during the first infusion, but it made your skin explode in large red pustules. Your face and neck were covered in mountains of acne spots, and you were too embarrassed to see people in person.

“I’ve always thought - ” you started and stopped, breathing heavily, “ - that God didn’t - that God doesn’t love me.” You forced out this confession, and then let your head hang again.

Even on all the anti anxiety medication you couldn’t hide your fear. I bent over you, held you trying to absorb the pain. You were growing more beautiful despite it all, and because of it all. The doctor warned us that we had to get your skin to clear. I guess we couldn’t imagine what would happen if it didn’t. The trial drug was shrinking the tumors again, but the protocol of the trial was that you must stop if your skin didn’t clear. But we didn’t know this until we did. If there was a sure moment when I would have taken a knife to anyone’s throat it might have been this juncture, when you were hanging by a thread and they cut it.

But now I can’t remember whether you said God didn’t love you, or that God hated you - which one was it? And why can’t I remember something this important now, when I can see the heavy linen tablecloth, and the swirls of pattern in reds and blues in the rug, and the delicate plant that you still managed to keep alive in its black pottery vessel?

I would still switch places with you, just so that I would not have to watch you suffer. But here we are, finding ourselves in this book together. I’m making it as a map, laying word-crumbs to find later when we are more fully ourselves. What early day was it that I told you I would live in a tent with you, and your eyes lit up? It must have seemed exaggerated at the time. But now I know the truth of it, since I am willing to go out into the lengths of time, to a place where there may not be anything to even drive tent poles into, in order to feel what I felt for you again.

I crouched down in between your knees and put my hands on you. Your skin was hot and damp. How could I disbelieve in the alive Nicholas right there in front of me? What else could I do but keep reminding you to stay mortal? Stay the way I can feel you and touch you. Did I take your hands in mine? Did I wipe the salt water from your cheeks? I hope so.

There’s the morning after one of our trips to the ER when I found you perched on the edge of the high bed in the guest room.

“Look,” you said, too exhausted to do more than gesture with your head toward the basket on the floor, overflowing with white tissue you used overnight.

I don’t know how I knew which piece to pick out, so it must have been pinkish. Inside was a bloody, matted clump. A piece of you. That strikes me deeply now.

“See?” your eyes asked me. For you this piece in the tissue was proof. The situation was hopeless. God hated you. You couldn’t be saved. Your eyes told me to capitulate. To admit that you were going to die. But it wasn’t within my bandwidth.

“Can you cough up a blood clot from your lung?” I typed into Google. The answer was yes! That’s where I saw the image of the bloody double branch of bronchi that someone had coughed up. A strangely preserved map of the estuaries of vessels in the lungs, bright red, and held up for the camera in the light like a piece of fine coral.

I ran back to the bedroom, excited to tell you that you weren’t dying. In fact you were getting rid of the thing that was killing you. You just coughed up the blood clot they found in your lung. You were cleansing!

I put my hands on your shoulders, kissed your forehead, and took your face in my palms. I made you look at me in the eyes while I told you again. See? It was good news. God didn’t hate you. This wasn’t the end.

Guilt falls heavier years later at what an unreliable narrator I was. I can see now I was complicit in not admitting Death into our story. I wanted you to believe that my love was as big as God’s. I wanted to believe believing would save you. After all, hadn’t we saved each other many times? I even mimicked your embolism with one of my own a few years later, gotten either through grief or a dose of Covid vaccine.

Finally Chemo, our last stand, was a blur of days and nights where you couldn’t move from your living room chair, or eat, or speak, or even cry. How could I know what to dispense to you for your pain when you already had as much medicine as a human could handle? You were deep in Morphine and Xanax and Codeine and Gabapentin and the rest. So complex a list that I made us a chart to hang on the fridge.

When the pain and nausea let up you would put your feet into my lap and my hands moved over the gardening calluses on your heels. I remembered to separate your pinkies from the rest of your toes every so often, and you sighed in pleasure.

As usual you asked me: “How did I get this lucky?”

And I always answered: “I don’t know!”

You fell in and out, and I talked as if all of you was still there. You startled awake every few minutes, apologizing for confusing your dream with reality. I was happy just to be in your dream. We watched whatever I chose: how Victorians lived, how medieval people lived, a psychedelic travelog through the world with a host who tried them, and the American version of The Office. Yes. That was the most soothing. What could be better to die to?

“How can you love me when there’s so little of me left?” you asked.

When you threw your head all the way back against the curved velvet couch, then I knew I could use my hands for drawing. I had another ingenious strategy to end my nail biting. I took out my pens and paper and continued The Book Of Unbitten Nails, which consisted of intricate doodle pages with bold, looping lines of color made with felt and ballpoint pens. You loved them and framed them.

If I was left without anything to occupy my fingers at night I would sit and bite my whole hands off. I started by picking at the cuticles and only stopped when there was blood. Apparently I was insatiable for my own skin. No matter how many times you asked me to stop hurting myself. I couldn’t understand what you meant.

Lately I get the sense that you don’t like me as hanging on tightly to your former human persona. There’s some comfort in knowing that there might be a realer substance. Possibly a small flicker of us that travels in the wormholes of time, and weaves through lifetimes. How strange that we label lives as ‘past’. Since there is no linear agenda outside of time, there is no evidence to suppose that I haven’t been there for your other ‘past’ iterations, or your ‘future’ ones. And there is no evidence that you might not have been there for young Kara as well. I feel the need to spell it out here that I have somehow made a promise to be there for all of it - whichever way it falls out.

This might sound like we have choices. I suspect that we are just carrying this weighty love that persists like the pilot light on the stove. It’s the small grain of light that I am growing into something bigger than both of us. “Surprise me,” was always your prayer. It’s a leap from A to the unknown. It’s all we have. Why did no-one explain this to me earlier?

With your subscription you also get access to our Writers Daily Dive, which is a weekly writing group on Zoom where we chat and then write in silence. Fridays we read from works in progress.

Monday-Friday 1:00-2:00, EST on Zoom: 863 8204 1826, Pass: dailydive

We are actually getting somewhere.

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This past Friday there were four readers - in the Catskills, NY, in Boulder, CO , in Tularosa NM, and In East Hampton, NY.

Chapters of the big wild book I am co-creating with my late trans husband can be found here: https://karawesterman.substack.com/s/suitable-vessel-for-magic

Writers Daily Dive meets on Zoom weekdays from 1:00-2:00, EST

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We are: @karawesterman Rochelle Williams ,TheUltraContemplative , Nina Carroll , Susanna Ungaro , Jennifer Elle , Caterina Verde , Geoffrey Gevalt , chris gaiman , Marya Hornbacher , Zara Bogaski , , , , , , , ,

I’m making my book for my late husband, and Rochelle is making hers fro her brother and for his daughter and maybe for his grandchildren that he, of course, never knew. For posterity, whatever that is.

We’re in the posterity business.

You are invited to join us on any Friday to read from your project in process.

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We also meet Monday through Thursday from 1 to 2 to just chat about what’s going on, and then write together in silence for 50 minutes or so. It’s just this great touchstone, and it’s the only way I could figure out how to show up for my book project every day.

We meet weekdays at 1:00-2:00 EST on Zoom to chat briefly, and then write together in silence. This has really kept me going through my process.

Now we will be sharing the fruits of our work in progress, and talking about our projects.

Join us any weekday here:

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Thank you writers! What a great group we had.

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You can read the latest chapter of our book here:

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