The Way Things Were
A visit to the past to meet my former self
It’s darker than I was expecting. I blink and look around, disoriented in the early twilight. It takes a few moments to figure out where I am, but once I see the red brick high school looming nearby and the ugly brownish purple station wagon parked beside me, it all comes back.
I forgot how much I hated this car. I walk around it and run my hand over the rust, remembering how I used to carry extra quarts of oil in the trunk so I could fill up in case it got low sooner than expected. I kneel down to look under the engine block. Sure enough, there’s a slick puddle.
It’s a chilly autumn evening, which means I’ll be leaving wrestling practice soon. Or, he will, I suppose. She? I’m not really sure which pronouns to use for this strange encounter. I settle in, leaning against my old car and noticing my breath is faintly visible. I wish I’d brought a coat. Midwestern weather is worse than I remember.
A few minutes pass before the front door of the school opens and tired-looking teenage boys with gym bags begin trickling out. One of them, a scrawny blonde kid in a green varsity jacket, starts heading toward me with his eyes cast downward, not noticing the shadowy figure looming near his car. When he finally looks up and sees me, he freezes.
“It’s OK,” I tell him, looking around to make sure the others have dispersed. I know how this will go. He’ll just stand there, not knowing what to do. I was always awkward and quiet in unfamiliar situations. “Just come with me. We need to talk.”
“Uh… what?”
“We’re getting coffee. Trust me, you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
Ugh. I forgot how literal I was in my youth. I sigh and explain, “Yeah. I don’t either. It’s just a saying. You can drink whatever you want. Come on.”
“I’m supposed to be getting home…”
“I know, but you weren’t going to do that anyways. You were thinking about stopping at Kmart and trying to work up the courage to buy a pair of tights. So just come with me instead.”
His eyes go wide and he stammers, “What? No. I… uh…”
“Look,” I interject, “let’s just cut right to it. I’m you. This a visit from the future. And since I know you won’t believe me…” I push my hair aside to show him the mole above my right temple, then pull up the hem of my skirt a few inches so he can see the hole on the inside of my knee from when we spent a month in traction. “Now can we go? I’m cold.”
There’s an amazed and perplexed look on his face. Knowing I have his attention, I start walking up the street, toward our favorite Internet cafe.
I forgot these things used to exist. Before WiFi was invented and everyone carried laptops into Starbucks, my friends and I would pay by the quarter-hour to play Quake on networked PCs running Windows 95, all while sipping hot cocoa. Suddenly I’m feeling very nostalgic.
It’s cozy in here. My younger self and I are sitting at a table by the window, sipping hot cocoa. I am, at least. He’s clearly agitated and unable to relax with a hot drink. He’s also been very quiet since I threw his world into a tailspin a few minutes ago.
“I remember when I used to wish I could own a place like this,” I say as I look around casually, taking some perverse pleasure in prolonging the awkwardness. “Try to resist that urge when it comes up. It’s a bad idea.”
“Why are you dressed like a girl?”
Tactful as always. It would be another ten years before I figured out the rules around graceful conversation and small talk.
“It’s a new thing I’m trying,” I answer. “Actually I played up the outfit a little bit just to help make the point. I’m really not a fan of skirts.” I stick one leg out from under the table to show him my boot. “You like it? They’re new.”
His face betrays his utter confusion. “But you’re not a girl.”
“Really? Then what’s up with these?” I look down at my breasts, visible in a low-cut top, then back at him with a grin. He’s not sure if I’m kidding. I was never great with sarcasm. “Sorry. Yeah, I get it. That’s what I thought too until a couple years ago, but as it turns out, you can be a girl if you want to.”
“What? How?!” His eyes betray him, but he quickly corrects. “I mean… why?”
“Through the magic of science,” I say with a flourish. “As for why, I think you already know that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the cross-dressing, Adam.”
He flinches, glancing quickly around the room to make sure nobody heard that, and replies defensively, “Don’t — Ugh. I — That’s crazy. I don’t… do anything like that.”
“Oh, OK. Then forget the cross-dressing. I’m talking about the transformation fantasies. Remember that one we had during the pep rally, daydreaming about everyone in the world suddenly changing sex? Or maybe I mean those birthday wishes about being able to alter your appearance on command. And if you don’t cross-dress, then why did you steal a pair of heels from the drama department and sneak them home inside your letter jacket that one — ”
“OK! Stop!” His face is bright red. “Just shut up.”
He says nothing else, but merely shrinks inward and stares down at the table. I’m fine with that. If there’s anything he and I can agree on, it’s that eye contact is unnecessary. He’s obviously uncomfortable, and I know better than to push him too hard when he’s in that state. I sip my hot cocoa in awkward silence for what feels like several minutes, until I remember how comfortable he is with silence and realize I’ll have to be the one who breaks it.
“Have I at least convinced you that I really am you from the future?”
“Yeah, OK. Fine.” He unfolds himself just slightly. “How does that work anyways? Is there time travel in the future?”
“Not important. Focus!”
“Whatever. That still doesn’t explain why you’re a chick now.”
I resist the urge to tell him that we are a chick, and he just hasn’t figured it out yet. That would only trigger a debate about biology. “It’s complicated,” I say. “In the future this kind of thing is better understood.”
I pause and take a slow breath. This is the moment of truth. Leaning forward, I tell him, “That’s why I came back. I wanted you to know there are other people like us, who have the same kinds of thoughts you have and do the same kinds of things. You’re not alone. Eventually it becomes easier for us to find each other.”
His expression is blank and uncomprehending. “What the hell are you talking about, people like us?”
“I mean,” I start to speak, but then pause, somewhat flummoxed. The right vocabulary doesn’t exist yet. The best I can come up with is, “people who want to be girls.”
His brows furrow with intense confusion. “You think I want to be a girl?” he asks quietly. “That’s insane.”
“Is it?” I ask a little more directly than I was intending. “You really think the other boys are laying in bed at night imagining turning into women? Trust me, they’re not.”
He just stares at me. Or rather, at my chin. I can tell he’s working through some sort of mental process. His knee is bouncing. His facial tics are getting more pronounced. That means he’s anxious. Of course he is. I’m starting to regret challenging him like that. It wasn’t my intention to show him the truth about himself, just to provide some comfort so maybe he’d figure it out on his own a little sooner. After several long drinks of cocoa, the silence is starting to get to me when he finally speaks.
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
Shit. He’s turning inward. I watch him, hoping he’ll re-engage, but he just sits there, quietly staring out the window. He’ll keep doing that indefinitely unless I draw him out.
“Adam,” I prod gently, “it’ll be OK. I promise, it gets better.”
“I don’t want it to get better,” he replies, still looking away from me. There’s a hard edge to his voice. “I want it to go away. I want to be normal.”
“It doesn’t go away…”
He pounds the table with his fist, just hard enough to shake it. I flinch, surprised by the sudden reaction. Then I think back to my old wrestling days, remembering the simmering anger I concealed and only allowed to come through in competition.
“Why can’t I just be like everybody else?” he asks himself with more than a hint of despair, still staring out the window. It’s hard to tell, but he might be fighting back tears. “There’s something wrong with me. God damn it…”
I start to say something, but then stop. I came here to tell him exactly the opposite, that there’s nothing wrong with him and he should push past those feelings of self-loathing and invalidation, but now that I’m here, I’m doubting myself. I remember those feelings well. I still have them, more often than I want to admit. I too want to be just like everybody else.
I look around at the Internet cafe, remembering that it’s 1996. I’m in western Illinois talking to a former altar boy in his junior year at a catholic high school. Even if I could show him who he really is, that might just make things worse. What’s he supposed to do, find a gender-affirming therapist? Look in the phone book for a local trans support group?
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I say quietly, mostly just to fill the dead air. He doesn’t respond.
I shouldn’t have come here. I wanted to give him hope, but instead I’ve scared him even further into the closet by showing him his greatest fear. My mere presence is proof that the thing he desperately wants to prevent is inevitable. If I’m not careful, he might lose hope completely.
Suddenly he stands and grabs his coat. “I need to go.”
Caught off-guard, I scramble for some way to bring closure to this encounter. “Don’t leave. There’s more — ” I reach for his arm, but he pulls it away, heading for the door. I leave my half-full mug behind and follow him into the cold evening.
I’m barely able to keep up as he trudges the few blocks back to his car. I know this mood. He’s withdrawing. My heart breaks. I want to hug him and say everything will be OK, but I know he won’t let me. I’m starting to feel as lost as he is, the old feelings of hopelessness bubbling up again.
“I’m sorry,” is all I can think to say. He ignores me, and I continue, “I know it doesn’t make any sense right now, but we can — ”.
He cuts me off. “Shut! Up!”
For a moment I’m scared of my own self. I just stop and stare at him, and to my relief he stops walking and turns around. We’re standing on the sidewalk outside some stranger’s house, in the cold, just beyond the range of a streetlight. He’s doing that seething expression, the one I remember from when my thoughts are moving too fast and my words can’t keep up.
“I just — errgh!” He stammers. His voice isn’t raised, but there’s a frustrated urgency to it. “I don’t know what you are, but it’s not me. OK? Just go away! I don’t need your help.”
He turns again to continue walking, and I can’t decide whether to follow him. I want to say I know exactly how he feels, that I can help him, but I don’t know whether I really can. There’s too much. How can I explain something so complex to someone who isn’t ready to hear it? This isn’t what I wanted at all. I was hoping to at least set him on the right path by telling him he isn’t alone, but it’s been too long, and I forgot how unwilling I was to engage with or even acknowledge what I was feeling and doing at his age.
I need to find some way to fix this.
“Maybe you’re right,” I blurt out, hoping to at least keep him from running away. It seems to work, as he looks over his shoulder and slows his walk, giving me a confused look. I move closer, walking alongside him. My hope now is to simply undo the damage I’ve done by coming here.
“Maybe you don’t need my help,” I offer sympathetically. “Maybe you can figure out something better.”
He just gives me a strange look. “What are you talking about?”
“If you really don’t want to become… this,” I say while gesturing at myself, “then maybe you don’t have to. I didn’t want to either, and I tried really hard not to, but maybe you’ll find a way.”
I feel bad for lying to myself, but in this moment it really feels like the only thing I can do is let this poor kid learn who she is the same way I did. The internal pronoun shift startles me, but I realize it’s true. The person I’m looking at now is a teenage girl trying desperately to be a boy.
She seems to be thinking over what I said, but is still withdrawn, and soon we’ve reached her car. She starts fumbling for her keys.
“There’s a lot of good parts too,” I say, trying to stall a bit longer. “You get married.” She looks up at me, curious, so I continue hesitantly. “I really shouldn’t say too much, but yeah. You go to college and make friends, and you have a successful career, and there’s even kids in the future.”
A little smile crosses her face. “Really?” she asks softly.
“Really. Everything normal people do. You get to have that life.”
She stares into the distance, and the look on her face seems like it might be a hopeful one, but then she looks back at me and it disappears. In her mind, I represent failure.
Not meeting my eye, she gets in her car and says simply, “I need to go.”
The engine makes a terrible noise as it starts, and she drives away without even a wave. I can’t help but feel a sense of inevitability as I watch my younger self fade into the distance. She’ll go home determined to live the life she desires, and she’ll reach the same end I did, and all I can do is stand here and watch her go. Once again I’m alone in the cold, in my own past, wishing I could change the way things were.
