Sharing a history can be harder than having one, but we have to try. Is this a true projection? We won't know until we get there.

---

Island Run

--Kiai 16Mar03/23nov03

 

 

The full moon is overhead, filling in anywhere that your headlight beam cannot. Before you is an archipelagic coastline that, counting interconnecting bridges as well as islands, just goes on and on and on beyond your front wheel, and the bike beneath you howls at them all as it lunges to meet them.

It is a pleasantly warm humid night. The coastal air is making your gloves slightly sweaty from the outside in, dampening the loose cotton clothing under your leathers, as if someone you like is breathing down your collar and up your sleeves... a lover's close attentions delivered out of the night by motorcycle. It insinuates its way beneath your jacket and bells out your shirt a little, idly caressing your unbound breasts. Focused as you are on the curves and turns of the road as it winds its way down the island chain, you idly submit to this invisible fondling, letting it arouse you a little, warm you up for what lies ahead.

The suppressed howl of the semiturbine engine is like a joyous scream that only you can hear, it seems so faint compared to the rush of wind past your helmet. Everything seems to focus into full-moon intensity, coming into an emotional clarity devoid of pretense or precedent, an extended moment that has lasted since you set out on this trip over an hour ago.

The mild waves glitter with moonlight, amusing themselves in solitude on their beaches as you pass. The metal roadbed grid of each bridge roars beneath your wheels, punctuating the smoother hiss of the concrete roadbed across each island. The road teases you with its slow count of alternations, each change in tone marking one step closer to your lover.

You have been lovers for most of the past year, but this appointment is special. It has been well over a year for the both of you, a full turn of seasons since each of you accepted the change, and now at last the both of you have mastered it.

For as long as you have known him, he has been a man who used to be a woman and remembers it all jealously. Even that first time, as he drove you into the wildest of passions, you could tell from his expert touch at your most intimate sensitivities, the masterful way in which he steered your ecstacies, that he knew with innate familiarity everything that he touched. In time, he even passed along ways he knew that you could best satisfy yourself when he could not be with you, trusting you with his cherished secret memories.

Now, for the first time, with your new-found control of your change, you can give him what he has been missing.

A year ago and more, weeks before the two of you ever met, you took the change at the same time. In the months since that first encounter, you have watched the signs of renewal, the visible indications of immortality, as they have stealthily erased the craggy lines from his face, rebuilt his musculature, replanted his hairline and stolen away with his aging.

Only his eyes have never changed: old, with a stark wisdom of bitter years, a charm that comes of long experience with weighing and sifting the essential and dismissing the ephemeral without offense, and an irony that comes from realizing that life is a battle fought in inevitable retreat.

That, at least, has changed: advances in genetics and quantum shifts have made possible advances in the battle of life, but the price is the change that goes with that.

Over the past year, you have explored how you express yourself as a woman who was once a man, learning this shape. Now there is the opportunity to explore further. It is not a reversion, of course: for all its habit and history, your mind has been made female by the year's journey in a woman's brain.

It is your natural form, now, after all. No matter how early in the day or late in the evening you assert your willed control over your form and put on your rejuvenated old male face, you will inevitably revert to this shape while you sleep; there can be no persistence. This youthful reflection of the best that your genes can deliver to a woman is too far removed from your ancient manhood.

You took on the change out of necessity, uncertain of anything other than life and prepared to defend that alone. The sharing that you have found with him, though, has made it all worthwhile. His patience with your menopause-in-reverse, as your female hormones and rhythms flared alight amid turbulence, eased your confusion and discomfort, as he lightened your distress with anecdotes of his own transition to crone. His lustiness for your elder form, even when all you saw of yourself was faded hair and wrinkled skin and withered breasts, helped you to embrace the changes as they restored your figure and face, sweeping away even that final familiarity of age.

He was on the journey with you, after all. Even then, you could see the youthening of his face, close up in the intimate disarray that followed lovemaking, as he struggled not to doze off, and then see in that slightly younger man's dark eyes the caring and the desire he held for you. As the year-mark approached for both of you, you could see in his eyes his delight at a promise fulfilled as he surveyed your youthful figure, fascinated by your loins and your breasts and then your face. He has returned to youth with you and held you close the while; and now he waits for you.

Now you wind down the motor, turning off the main highway into the streets of the island town where he lives, and it is with a sense of fulfillment that you find your space and park the bike. The engine shuts down with a plaintive note, as if surprised that the road would not last forever, but you are intent on what comes next. You pull your helmet off and settle it on your arm, then turn to where the overshadowing trees cloak the ground from the streetlights, where you two have stood sheltered many a time, where you know that your young man must be waiting.

He moves out of the shadows, smiling, and you move to embrace him and kiss him. Then you step back to look him over anew, and your eyes meet his as he does the same with you: nothing is to be taken for granted, now, not since the rules have been amended once again.

Savoring each others' approving gaze is enough for awhile. It is he that first breaks the silence, ready to move onward. Even so, it is in a lover's whisper, at once intimate and urgent and vulnerable, that he says, "Shall we try it?"

You give him back that throaty whisper. "Let's."

He nods. "Yes, let's."

"You first, then."

He concentrates, standing there with eyes closed for long moments, and then he shrinks in upon himself a little in becoming female. You are surprised to see the youthful face she shows, surprised to see her shapely lithe figure unscarred by motherhood. You already knew his female form was attractive to you, because you had offered old photos to each other, but this sylph is like a new dawn, as if time has forgiven her all her earlier experiences.

She leans over, looking down at herself, then back up at you as if proud to show you what she has become. She smiles and gestures broadly, and her directness shows in her bearing.

"Now you."

So you close your eyes and you focus within, finding the presence in the emptiness of self, as you were taught, and you assert without asserting, and then you feel the breasts slip away. The once-was-permanent presence between your legs is back again, clinging to the skin of your thighs once more, no longer unnoticed, now obtrusive. You shrug the heavy jacket into place around your wider shoulders and settle the waistband of your pants on your narrower hips, drowning out the private sensations with overtly public ones.

"Oh, yes..."

"Well, thank you, ma'am." Even now, you can feel the female within you, inescapable: it is what you are, after all, and it is permeating your viewpoint and your attitude. This shape, the gender you were born into, seemingly a double lifetime ago, is your alternate shape now and you know it. "Perhaps we should..."

"Right now?"

"Well..."

Perhaps you're more assertive with it for it being forced; or perhaps there are aspects of your old behavior, with the old viewpoint's underpinnings, that are striking sparks on her year-old manliness by their implicit presumptions.

"I don't know..."

Within moments, you both can feel it in the subtleties of the interaction: she is a man submitting to being a woman for the sake of love and habit and fond memory. You are a woman asserting a maleness no longer yours by rote, and it shows: your approach is too overt, too brusque for the sensitivity of the changed viewpoints. The old learned finesse is gone, along with the easy familiarity on which it was based.

"Let's..."

The clash is communicated by flickers of expression in a glance: you two need room to work this out.

By unspoken agreement, rather than go up to her place, you two walk over to a late-night eatery where you are both well-known.

Friends look up, take in the exchanged genders, recognizing the two of you by clothing and general features, and nod and look away again, perhaps sensing the tension.

Eventually a late dinner is brought over, and then you two are alone in the crowd again, unexpectedly struggling simply to share a meal as lovers do.

"...So, fair lady, what--"

"Oh, but, sir... Hm. Weird..."

All the old conversational spins and turns don't work when the actors have these new faces, these exchanged roles. Even swapping the scripts can't help: both know who originated the lines. The conversation stalls, limps along with wider pauses, then stalls again and is not restarted.

The stillness is made more dense, more potent, as it is compressed by the normal sounds that surround it. You take it in with every breath, until it silences every thought but one: this was a mistake.

The casual talk before the silence still reverberates in your mind, and you pick at it, searching for meaning. The words were the same calm lovers' conversation, but the undertone was getting subtly bitter and strident. She was responding to your manhood as a challenge to her own, because you are too artlessly asserting it; like armor where there should be no battle, but one arises because the armor provokes it.

"Oh." You suddenly realize: this will not last. Startled, you glance over at her and see it in her eyes too, that realization of loss.

The tension lifts, but it's because, still in love, you two are now moving the relationship into endgame, arranging for this unforeseen closure in order to preserve the affection and friendship.

Still in silence, the two of you efficiently finish dining, pay for the meal, make your goodbyes to those still there, and then walk out, hand in hand.

Once outside, you shift yourself back to your normal female form. She keeps her female shape, and you feel her relax somewhat, but now both are groping for the meaning of it.

It's not her fault: it's inherent.

Only then do you see that realizing her fond memories of making love to a man would rudely violate her year of manhood, coming so soon upon it. It would be a rape all the more intimate because she did it to herself.

It's not your fault either.

You did not come here to help her abuse herself; neither of you did. It is an artifact of life and change, something both of you helped construct with your presumptions without knowing, something which now blocks all direct routes forward. You can never be the man you once were. You have yet to learn how to be the man that you now can be. She has the same lessons to learn about her past and present womanhood.

Perhaps in another decade, when both are more comfortable with equal ownership of both shapes, there can be a more middle-of-the-genders mindset from which both can embrace without competing. You have centuries, now; there is time in which to attain this new level of awareness.

For now, though, even abstaining would not solve this contention. The knowing would persist, and taint everything.

You gently pull her hand towards you, and she slowly swings around as if indecisive, then catches her free arm around your waist and draws you close. There is a deep-drawn kiss, then, probably the last, a regretful quitclaim on the other's intentions.

You two will inevitably seek lovers on your own sides of the divide now, for the next stage of this journey which you both now know you must make in separate parallels.

You'll probably seek someone who can respond to your token maleness, and reciprocate with the same just-kidding deftness with which you will try to take the sting out of the presumptuousness of your old ingrained male habits as they're brought out along with the form.

She'll probably seek someone who knows the old way of behaving like a woman, so that her manhood isn't threatened when it's her turn.

Both of you are still too young to it all. This business of being three people in one, a man and a woman and an awareness of what being both means, is so new to both of you that that third awareness is still in its infancy. It's just as well that you're not staying out too late.

You can't stay the night; that would destroy any distant possibilities. Instead, so as not to stay becalmed by indecision, you make to pull your helmet back on; and she immediately clutches you closer. Her momentary blocking of the arm with the helmet hanging on it is her most overt expression of regret. Then she straightens up and leans in close again, eye to eye for the first time in the year, and earnestly whispers her wish that it were otherwise. "Gods, I'm gonna miss you..."

"I'm gonna miss you too..."

"Let's--"

"No. If we promise anything we'll never get there. I love you; I would rather keep that."

"I... I guess I feel the same."

Both hands freed at last, you lift the helmet and pull it down over your head. As you fasten the D-strap, she slides a hand up under your shirt and gently caresses, first one breast, then the other, back and forth, as if she doesn't know which one will miss her most.

You reach down and pull out her hand, bring it up to the face shield opening to kiss it, and then just stand there taking in her beauty, grasping her hand ever so tightly as you look at what is mirrored in her eyes.

You are two women whose longing for each other is overshadowed by your phantom male presences; they glare at each other over your shoulders. She won't shift back to her native male shape until you're gone; you both know that it would be bitter teasing.

The emotions are becoming too poignant. You turn, walk over and start the bike, hearing its lone-wolf moan ascending the octave as you flip closed the clear shield, forbidding tears, saving face. You zip the jacket closed, minimizing your exposure.

You capture one last look as you mount the saddle, seeing how she stands, hands folded on each other instead of you, and then you gently ease in the clutch, trying not to let the bike make you look like you're running away, even though you both are.

Then it's her indistinct form in the mirrors for a moment, twin ghosts of old hopes, before the geometry of the road takes even that from view as you turn the front wheel.

It's the first of many steel-grate bridge beds coming up, and then it's growling under your wheels, and then it's behind you, and you're no longer on the same island. There is the setting moon behind you to one side; you can sometimes spy it in the mirrors when the road twists.

Your headlong passage tears up a cooler wind, now, and a thicker one, teasing your nipples up again, but with cold, now, not with desire, bracing you for the colder other end of the ride.

You fumble with the jacket, finally pushing in that snap at the tip of the double-breasted collar, closing yourself off from that chill caress, and settle down in the saddle for the long ride back. You glance at the two mirrors in turn a few times before regretfully trusting that they're empty, as the past always must be as it recedes.

Don't let the tears obscure your view of the long road ahead: you might miss your turn.