Maybe what keeps us on our course is fearing how the shock of change will shake the people whom we know.

Let your hair grow long, too long, then cut it short, and watch the flicker of reaction in others' eyes, whether or not they say anything -- though we all know most will say something. It's not really the way a friend might react, nor parents, brothers, sisters -- the ones who know us best, who may even love us -- they aren't really those we fear to shock. Other fears there, with them. The flicker in the eyes that puts us most on guard are those we see in the near-strangers who we may know from the next cubicle, that push-cart or the drive-in where we always buy our lunch, the couple in the apartment across the hall.

A face lost in a crowd, as anyone of us is, demands easy recognition to enjoy the safety of casual dismissal, the anonymity that protects from the way that passion rends you to your core. I have been happy enough -- before you came -- to be one of the tens of thousands of almost-familiar faces staring grimly through a windshield, inching along an Interstate bound for work. Happy enough to be the bland and mild face you may have thought you saw right in the middle of the phalanx waiting at curbside for the light, the light that in a moment will let us march lockstep across the avenue. To be the person, third aisle down, fourth doorway on the right who gets accounting's weekly printout in my inbox. A world that barely sees us needs us to be constant.
But I am changed. I am. Aren't I?

I sip my morning coffee and tell myself so, anyway.

We are a conversation with the world -- sometimes, a one-way conversation, sometimes not. When we were just kids, we'd bounce a basketball in a driveway to our own running radio-announcer-styled commentary of our invisible triumphs; what were the inner guiding voices that the little girls down the street would hear? Sometimes, as now, a different monologue, one of all our unanswered questions: Why me? What am I now to do? Or, again: This is what I did once, but can't do now. There are a hundred little things, a thousand, that we will always do just so, and signal to ourselves and to whoever watches that we are who we have been all along. This man. This woman.

The touch of a hem above a knee, the way legs cross, the fact of clothing that hides this, shows that: a new vocabulary for my internal commentary, for that web of words defining me, tying me to the world.`Shall I sit now? I shall, I think. Step here, close enough? Closer? Not quite. Ankles together? Now knees? Swing rear? Like this? Try again. And once I rise -- oops, was that a lurch? Do I galoomp too much, walking across the room to fetch my cup of ... better tea than coffee, I think.

Each tiny task, like the smaller steps I deliberately try to take, demands such concentration, tugs like a new scab might on stretching skin as you reach for something that you need. There is a hint in any twinge like that, a hint that just as you reach, you risk. Minor discomfort, reopened wound, which will it be -- and not knowing for sure, do you stop reaching? Do you find some other way, take another step so you don't have to reach quite so far? Decide that what you reached for isn't worth it just for now?

Such tiny gestures: my hand holding the steaming cup of tea like this, not that way, the little grimace of my lips that I try now when I decide the first sip is just a shade too hot still. I am preoccupied with stereotype, with the expected, the conventions of behavior I do not really know.

Let's say I have a cubicle somewhere, within the maze of a floor of a one-block-square building like a hundred that you've seen before. When I lift my head and peer across the rows and rows and rows of grey-cloth-covered fences pretending to be walls, I see the bent heads of people whose names I almost know: He who I rode up with in the elevator, she who nearly bumped into me by the copier. The windows in the distance, far across this sea of cubicles open out only to a view of rows and rows of office towers, maybe. Maybe just a black and rainwashed plain of parking lots, the roaring superhighway just beyond.

Or maybe there is glinting of magic, like a violet shadow on a concrete wall, in the grey days of our too familiar world. Maybe now I can lift my head, shake free from that inward curve of chest I had, unthinking, slumped into. Yes: those are breasts there, I don't care whether you see or not. A toss of hair out of my eyes: yes, that's right, that's the way we do. So there.

Hair grows an inch a month. I start with hair that likely was an inch or two too long for who I was; before too many more weeks pass, my hair will hide the back of my neck, ears will be covered. In two months, three, when I bend my neck to the side, ends of my hair will tickle my shoulders. A loose white shirt or a baggy cardigan will (particularly if I remember to slump) hide any new curves of breasts, of waist. And if in weeks to come, I sometimes need to arch my back and fabric presses curve, and if the new shirt that I wear a week or two from now is not as loose, or if perhaps it buttons down a different side, would anyone remark? If baggy sweaters go from brown to beige to primrose as the weeks go by, would anyone remark that their colleague in the third cubicle over looks a little more sprightly these days. Perhaps it is that spring is coming soon?

What if, the next day or the day after when someone in another cubicle asks: Where is what's'name? the answer is: Oh, she is ill? If chatting by the copier, the vending machine, my friend should let my name float out with an extra "a" or "ie" at the end sometimes, who would really care that much?Would it take a month, two, before a certain unformed memory of me would fade?

Imagine that it could be just a game of clothes and pronouns that sets the rules with which we engage the world, and it does us.

Mondays for change, then. Each incremental step, I unveil on a Monday. The torso's twist that for an instant reveals, a sweater in a pastel shade, a flourish for finishing a gesture, a pursing of lips: a moue.

Mondays are for the whispers that the girls breath into each other's ears as they nibble on the sweet rolls that they brought to work. Mondays are when they unwrap themselves for another week, jackets falling open, coats slipped off and feelings that had been held deep, deep within delicately unveiled and lifted up to the light, the blue fluorescent light of the coffee break room, in order to be shared. And I am there sometimes. On Mondays, for the tales of the Fridays past, the stories from the hours after we step into the lavender shadow of approaching night. Listening, for what have I to tell but how it feels to cling here on the edge, the way that when I was oh so much younger I might have felt as fingers slipped along the wet planks of the pier, hanging there in the chill dark water, unwilling to let go and be immersed, not wanting -- not at all -- to try to paddle to the other end where all the other brand-new swimmers wait. Not sure that a frantic lunge and splashing panic can bring me safely to where the white sand of the lake bottom gleams dimly through the water.

I take my tiny steps into a new-woven web of gesture and glances exchanged that increasingly connects me -- seems to connect me -- in a different way to a different world. Tiny steps, like a minuet, a gavotte. Violins flicking precise crystalline notes, to match the precise turns and stops and steps of this most elaborate of dances. In this quadrille, we approach, step apart and twirl away. The ebbs and flows over the weeks; come close, retreat; smile and flee. Except my flight is not a flight, just a swirling around to the far end of the ballroom where I will spin again and the long gown will float behind so he will catch his glimpse of tiny ankle, curve of a calf. And with a tiny gasp, inhale.

"Ah," I hear you say from somewhere behind me as I sit, back at the bar again. "Ah yes, the dance."

You're back?

"You are doing quite well."

I am only hiding in a careful confusion of clothing and gesture, pronoun and presence slowly revealed, floating quite unremarked past others eyes until, some Friday down the road, some will see, or hear, or know somehow to ask.

"Unremarked?"

Unremarked, yes. That's the plan. To gradually change, unnoticed, right before their eyes, until maybe someday they might could see what you have made me -- or much more likely only somehow sense the halfway being that I am, that presence in the corner of an eye that must be blinked away.

"Are you quite sure that you are, as you say, unremarked?"

That's what I need. That's what I need. Need to be unremarked, because of you. Because of what you have made me ...

"What I have made?"

What you have made me ...

"Ah," And if I could turn to see, I know that you would nod; but do you smile or frown, is that sympathy that makes your eyes glow or a call to revelation making you crease your brow.

"Ah," you say. "How can I have made you? How can anyone do that?"

You did, you did. You came, like a ghost in the night, an incubus and with your touch, with your insistent touch, you did. With your words, words like battering rams, you broke through me, shattered my doorway, entered and made me. Made me.

"That sounds quite mad."

From deep within, a red wave rises. From behind my tight-shut eyes, for now I do not want to see what I am sure is your mocking grin. Impotent anger: Oh, I want to clench fists and drum them on your chest. Oh yes, I am quite mad, that you -- yes you -- have done this to me, that you, because you wanted to, because you can, because you have the power, because you can do what you will, what you desire. That you, because you are so large, because you are so certain, because you come and go so freely, as freely as I would like to come and go myself, can do this. Oh yes, I'm mad. Oh yes, as I flit through my days, just beyond the focus of the eyes around me, oh yes, as I bend my head in my study of the tiny things that my change now demands that I must master, oh yes, I am quite mad, quite mad at you.

"I meant," (and now I am quite sure that you grin) "I meant mad in quite the other sense."

The other sense?

"I meant: How can it be that some unnamed, unknown visitor in the night can do what has been done to you? An incubus? My touch, my strange and potent seed in you: That can remake you? In a single night, my touch on your shoulder, my fingers on your skin, my erect cock inside your mouth, that can remake you?"

Yes. Yes, that can. Yes, you have.

"How can it be that we have made a myth," you say. "The two of us, here in this gray little place, where that billboard for the Chevvy dealer looms, under this overcast sky, by that litter-strewn beach where the cold gray sea batters so mindlessly at the shore. A myth, we two?"

And yet I am remade. I am. I feel it, when on a weekend evening, pacing in my dark apartment, the hem of the skirt I dare not yet wear at work touches my knee; feel it when his eyes dart my way across the parking lot at the end of day and linger, just a second longer than they might have once. I feel it in the way the heaviness between my hipbones roots me to the ground in a way I've never felt before, the way the slight new weight upon my chest shifts as I turn. I feel in the way my hand now wants to float, the way more delicate fingers need to flutter sometimes.

"You feel you are. Perhaps, though, what the world sees is something else."

You mean? I don't know what you mean. I won't know. Won't, because I do know, but I do not want to say.

"Perhaps all that the world sees is someone playing at something that's quite impossible."

I do not want this, no. I did not. You did this, not me.

"It is impossible, after all," you say. "Isn't it?"

It can't be. I need it not to be.

"Perhaps what the world sees now is just a shadow who is breaking down. Who sheds his self control, who sheds himself, as he breaks down. Who thinks, who really thinks, a creature in the night has wrought a kind of magic. Who thinks, who honestly believes, he's been transformed. Who thinks, who dares to think, he can fool us. Perhaps as you sashay down the aisles between the cubicles, they look and snicker at the crazy little ... well, you know the word."

Now, at last, I feel your touch again. And now, I dare to turn, for I have no other choice; I steel myself for your cruel smile but see only the wet gleam of your eyes.

I stand, a pathway through the crowd seems to appear. I walk, slow and stately as a pallbearer, towards the street.There is a tiny anteroom before the final step, a small dark mirror on the wall that mists when the damp fog outside and warmth within collide.

Through the steam on the mirror, I cannot focus. In the fog from the sea, I dissolve.