Follows are my hyper-analytical observations written shortly after my first date with Sera.
Dinner
She’s standing on the sidewalk playing with her phone, her body curled inward like a pill bug, broadcasting Look Elsewhere.
“Can I hug you?” I ask.
I like hugging people when I meet them for the first time because it tells me a little bit about how physical they are in general. People who hug their friends all the time, for instance, rarely hesitate to hug a smiling pipsqueak like me. People who have stronger boundaries around physical touch might say No, offer a handshake or hesitate and then agree. The hug itself is also important: it tells me something about their basic comfort with their own bodies and with physical touch.
She hesitates, then agrees, verbalizing her internal monologue: yes, because we have a Facebook friend in common. It’s a ginger hug, which I mirror, and there’s something in the frame that feels like she sees herself as fragile in some way. She did mention back pain. There’s more to the gingerness, though, and if I had to guess: she’s not been drowning in physical affection recently.
She’s a beautiful girl — with a sharp little nose that makes me think she’d be a terrifyingly gorgeous villainess lawyer — and the only thing that flags her non-binary status is the very faint stubble of a beard under her makeup.
The waitress leads us to a corner table, passed the gorgeous window seat with a low table and floor cushions. Sera sees it and asks if we can sit there. The waitress doesn’t hear her. Sera asks again, confident and a bit aristocratic; the feel of someone who’s used to getting what they ask for.
“You’ll have to take your shoes off,” the waitress warns us.
We sit at the bench by our window seat. I pull off my Merrells and leave them under the bench. She slips off her flats and leaves them on the floor in front of the bench. Not as concerned as me about being in other people’s way? I file the data point. (Later, a couple sits on the same bench waiting for a take-out order, and she looks to see if the guy is going to put his shoes on hers. I can’t see if he does, but after they leave, the shoes remain in tact, slightly in the way, until Sera reclaims them at our departure.)
The waitress mostly interacts with me at the beginning. Is she worried about staring at Sera? The Thai have a cultural politeness — at least among the Thai Americans I know — that makes American politeness look flimsy. By the end of our visit, though, she’s making eye contact with Sera and me equally. Perhaps she made some kind of internal peace and returned Sera to human status from the temporary non-binary placeholder status some people place her in as they make decisions about interacting with someone outside their normal gender-guided interactive experience.
We split the Miang Kham, and talk about the accumulative heat of the chili peppers. Our Thai iced teas come in fancy bottles I haven’t seen there before. An affectation of decorating the window?
At some point during the meal, a handsome black man with long braids stops by to comment on the awesome window seat option. It’s clear he’s actually stopping to hit on Sera, and it’s only as he comes this close that he finally sees the tell-tale shadow under Sera’s makeup. He freezes, then recovers, decides to continue exactly as he would have without that moment. We wave him off with smiles.
The food is lovely and Sera tells stories. I listen, occasionally interjecting a sentence here and there. There isn’t room yet in our conversation for my long pauses and meandering way of speaking. And Sera is an excellent raconteur.
Her eyes are a luminescent brown. I didn’t even know brown could do that.
Pinball
Of all the places we visited on our date, Add-a-Ball wins for having the most employees and patrons who didn’t double-take Sera or who single-glance-got-it and didn’t care. One girl saw Sera emerge from the Ladies’ Room, registered the non-binary with a double take, and then simply smiled and moved on with her life. That was all I caught. The bouncer checking our IDs doesn’t linger on hers for a gender confirmation; she’s just another assembly line patron with a face that matches her ID.
Everywhere else there’s a visible pause in how people see Sera: they make the snap judgment, their eyes dart back immediately for a closer look and then they have an internal conversation with themselves about identity and their views on gender identity, and their faces have a limited number of responses at that moment. They smile and want us to see their acceptance. They smile and move on. Their face goes slack because they don’t know how to react, remember to be polite and then move on. Those might even smile again, but it doesn’t reach their eyes. Or, they stare. Which, thanks to the temperament of most Seattle people, was easily conquered by me moving in a way where I could catch their eye and raise my eyebrows in a very slight admonishment and then smile, at which point they’re now reacting to me — sometimes with a smile of chagrin, sometimes with embarrassment for realizing they were staring — and they move on.
We tour the bar because she’s never been. She finds a childhood arcade game she loved, and I point out my occupied pinball machine, the cruel Paragon. We play pinball Taxi, learn the player 2 joystick control is broken on Bubble Bobble, and finally get our hands on “my” pinball machine.
Sera’s skills improve exponentially, while I slog along with mediocre determination and bad luck. She’s got some mad trash talking skills. It’s my first chance to see Sera completely unselfconscious. She’s totally focused on playing, railing at the Beasts’ Lair, hating on the gap between the two bottom right flippers. She’s sarcastic and hilarious. She’s lit up with friendly competition. I like this girl. We would definitely have been friends in high school.
In the car with stories
There’s a hand-addressed envelope on the dash, and she shows it to me. As she builds her internet presence as a transwoman and trans ambassador, she’s made a pledge to send small gifts to certain social media followers. This leads to a beautiful story.
Sera was in Snohomish awhile back, waiting for a friend to be free for the evening. As she was poking around one of the antique stores, she came upon an old bunny bank. You may remember them: ceramic but with a tactile fuzz on the surface that would wear away and grow shiny beneath. I didn’t have one, but I clearly examined someone else’s closely when I was a child. Sera had one as a child and loved it, and promised herself she’d come back to buy it as a gift.
She got to talking to the proprietor, their shared history as veterans, her life since discovering she was a girl. He tells her she is brave, and when she returns to the store later to use the bathroom and ask for a restaurant recommendation where she’ll be safe, he sends her to a local restaurant, tells her to say Hi to so-and-so from him, and gives her the bunny bank.
The bunny bank and the story will be one of those gifts.
Dilletante
The hostess is lovely and looks a bit like Taylor Swift. Sera says so. Based on the conversation that follows, she hears it a lot, but she especially likes hearing it from Sera. She talks to Sera with glowing eyes and a warm smile and when I interject, her eyes briefly flit to me, a shadow of annoyance I’d expect from a slightly princessy teen or 20-something girl, before returning to Sera. She sees Sera, sees how beautiful she is, and also sees her non-binary status and needs Sera to see that she doesn’t care, that she was touched by something long before tonight that made her want to fight for the right and dignity of all transpeople. I don’t care if this girl is actually a catty princess, right now I just want to hug her.
After sipping and discarding chocolate martinis, I warn Sera that my apartment smells like wet cat food, but does she want to come over? She does. She doesn’t demonstrate much curiosity once she’s at my place, and I don’t know how to feel about that. I love it when people ask me about my things. I don’t keep much, so everything I keep has a story.
Slumber Party
I clean up my room and set Widget inside her “kitty bucket” — a heated cat bed — between us. Sera surprises me by fitting into my pajama pants and I lend her my Guardians of the Galaxy t-shirt. We watch a few youtube videos: FKA Twigs, Kimbra.
I’m tired and she asks if we can maybe move chastity cat so we can curl up together. I decide this is Ok.
I’m so sleepy. I wake up three times, hearing Sera’s steady awake-breathing each time. On the third time, I smile to myself, and say, “Have you slept at all?” She wins points for letting me sleep. It’s 5am and we aren’t destined for any more sleep.
But I don’t like Radiohead
Damn it, I’m going to have to accept that I might actually like Radiohead. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this moment.
Sera sings a Radiohead song for me in the car on the way to breakfast. Her voice is any goth teen’s dream. I have a list of songs in my head I want to hear her sing, like “Pale Shelter” by Tears for Fears.
Cafe Flora
We’re in a new public experience now where Sera’s non-binary status is more apparent. She has only the remnants of some eyeliner from the night before, and is otherwise a woman who clearly needs to shave (the stubble being the sign of that need instead of women I know who usually let their facial hair grow out soft or get electrolysis to be rid of it.)
The waitress and the food runner don’t care at all. Neither double-take, and they make eye contact with both of us equally. Other staff and patrons show signs of the visible pause I’ve noticed elsewhere. I see only curiosity in their faces, nothing troublesome or hesitant or conflicted.
When she goes to the bathroom, with its lovely gender-safe sign, Sera comments that she got some looks in the bathroom. Her body language has become a little agitated and uncomfortable. I hold out a hand to reassure her, and point out that, once the stubble is all gone, she’s going to become a chameleon. She’s going to be just another pretty girl, then. But while she’s still visible, she has a great opportunity to be a trans ambassador, something that matters to her. Later, like me, she’ll often have to speak up about how she’s different.
As I walk her to her car and say goodbye for the day, I touch her back lightly to usher her through a sudden crowd of people. “I am such a lesbian,” she says.
I try to see which girls she thought was cute. But she meant my hand.
Conclusion
Throughout the weekend, I was constantly privy to Sera’s second and third thoughts — as Terry Pratchett calls them — and it was very clear that she is extremely self-aware. She’ll worry that she loves how I see her and may not even know if she likes actual me. I’ll probably worry about that, too. She’s confident enough to worry that I like her too much. I sometimes come off as liking someone more than I do just because I’m intense and curious and radically present.
I like Sera. I also know I’ve only scratched the surface on who she is, and I don’t have any clear concept of who she’ll be in my life. Analytically, I don’t know if we’re a good temperament match; she might want more attention than I can give.
She’ll examine her intentions with a magnifying glass. Me, too.
