Some Hurts Don’t Go Away
“I just don’t desire you anymore.”
I let the words hang there, floating like fumes in the middle of the room. I felt like they could suffocate me. I swallowed, and spoke.
“What does that mean?”
It meant the end of a relationship I’d held close to my heart. It meant that the suffering and sacrifice were over, but with the death of a partnership instead of a revival.
And not just that.
Those words, somehow both sharp and blunt, felt like a heavy boot trampling over a little green shoot that I had been trying to cultivate. The identity that was growing a little more every day — the woman I wasn’t born as but was meant to be, stomped on as if it wasn’t even there. I wasn’t desirable because I wasn’t a woman, and I wasn’t a woman because I had been too afraid of losing the relationship to say “I’M TRANS!” instead of “I’m genderfluid and want to figure that out.”
Being unwanted hurts deep. Not even seen, deeper still. My mind scrambled and panicked as I tried to understand how all the years together, everything shared, led to this. I felt like I had simply been given notice, everything I had poured into that relationship suddenly worthless even as it came at the cost of becoming myself.
