Version Control - part 5 (with images) (Patreon)

I wake up reaching for normal and find the flannel instead.

The flannel, and under it: the weight, the presence, the soft press of breast tissue against the inside of the fabric when I shift. I lie still a moment with this. I'd had some half-formed notion that sleep might reset things — that I'd wake up and the previous day would have the feeling of something that hadn't quite happened. The breasts don't care about this notion. They're there, settled against my ribs, and the morning is cold and Sera is still asleep beside me.

I get up carefully and go to the bathroom and shower.

The water hitting the chest registers temperature the way my chest never did — the shift from cool spray to hot landing on the surface of the breast tissue as a distinct event, warmth spreading through from outside in. I wash my hair, which means bending forward under the spray, and the breasts hang forward when I do, swinging slightly with the motion of my hands on my scalp.

I work down my body. The chest needs attention rather than the brisk pass I've given it for thirty-one years — the tissue registers the drag of my hands in a way I have to account for. I find what works.

I get out and reach for the towel and drag it across my chest the way I always do.

I stop.

The nipples. Even the transit of the towel across them is enough — that same brightness I found when taking off the shirt yesterday, the system lighting up without warning, no pain just an immediacy so concentrated it overrides everything else for a second. I stand there with the towel in my hands and understand that I've been treating this chest the way I've always treated my chest and that's not going to work anymore. I try patting this time and the difference is total. I work my way around and down more carefully.

I get dressed. Or I start to. The flannel over a loose t-shirt — that part is the same as yesterday. The oldest jeans. But when I look in the mirror in the flannel and t-shirt I stop, because the shape under the flannel is visible. Not dramatically — the flannel is old and shapeless — but visible if you know what you're looking for. A TA who turns up to a workshop with noticeably different chest architecture than he had on Monday is a TA who has to answer questions he doesn't have answers to. I stand there and think about this.

The solution, if there is one, is more layers. A heavier overshirt on top of the flannel. I find one in the back of the closet, a Carhartt that I wear in February when it gets really cold, stiff canvas that hangs straight and hides everything. I put it on and look in the mirror. Better. I look like someone who got cold. Twelve students. Seventy-five minutes. I can do this.

I eat standing at the kitchen window with a piece of toast and think about the Carol essay. The grandmother piece has a structure problem — the death scene needs to come earlier — and I've been working out how to say this in a way that doesn't close Carol down. She tends to defend her structural choices before examining them. It's a first-year habit, treating the work as argument rather than material. I'm thinking about how I learned to stop doing that, whether there was a single moment or whether it accrued, and I finish my toast and go.

The bus is warm. I stand in the aisle and hold the bar and think about Carol's grandmother and how to open Carol toward the structure problem rather than directing her at it, and I get off at my stop.

The seminar room is on the third floor. I get there early and set out my notes and the room fills. I know these students well enough now to see them as a system — who will push, who will wait to be pushed, who is still reading the assigned work and who has started coasting. The McKenna essay from two weeks ago shook the room in a useful way, got them fighting about what nonfiction is for. I want to keep some of that energy in the room today. Carol's essay is quieter, more interior, which means the conversation could go flat if I let it. I'm thinking about this when Carol comes in, last as usual, the author's expression she always has on workshop days — braced, a little pale.

She sits across from me.

I teach the class.

It goes well for the first twenty minutes. The room finds the structure problem in Carol's essay and converges on it from different angles and I'm tracking the conversation and asking the right questions and it's the work I know how to do. Owen makes a point about the essay's tense shifts that I wouldn't have surfaced myself — I write it down, a note I'll actually use. A student named Brigit, who is usually quiet, says something sharp about how the grandmother's silence reads as evasion rather than mystery. The room responds. Carol is listening hard, which is good; she's a writer who actually takes workshop in, doesn't just wait for it to be over.

Then something begins.

It starts as a warmth. Then a fullness. Then — while Owen is talking about the essay's third section, while I'm watching Owen and nodding at the right intervals — the unmistakable sensation of something happening below my waist. A slow reorganization, a change in what is where that is thorough and patient and does not care that I am in a seminar room.

The way my weight settles into the chair has shifted — the hips wider now, the ass rounder and fuller, and lower down, the hard wooden seat pressing against tissue that's newly present, soft, warm, registering the pressure of the chair in a way my body has never registered a chair before. I press my knees together and the chair creaks noticeably. The contact there changes — the inner thighs now meeting differently, and between them a warmth that keeps deepening.

The jeans have changed their relationship to my body. Not sliding off — the opposite, the denim gripping where the hips have spread, the seat pulling tight and the waist gapping in front because it's stretched back over a fuller seat. My feet are wrong in my shoes — shorter now, narrower, moving inside the leather.

I angle my chair toward the table. Under cover of it I slide my left hand into my front pocket and angle my fingers through the opening just far enough to press the flat of them against the front of the denim — carefully, a gesture that could plausibly be casual — and what I find is flat. The familiar bulk: gone. The denim lies close against something that gives slightly under my fingertips, something soft and warm. I take my hand back.

And the dampness. Low, present, a warmth that isn't sweat — the body doing what this body apparently does, unremarkably, as a matter of course, producing its own warmth and moisture against the cotton of the boxers in a way I cannot stop being aware of with every shift of weight.

Carol’s taking notes while Brigit comments, thoroughly, as if there’s an insight there that will perfect the piece. She’s trying not to show any reaction, and you can see it on her face.

"I think the problem," I say to her, "is that you're treating the death scene as an obstacle. When it's actually the door. Everything else in the essay is circling it. You have to go through it to get anywhere."

Carol writes this down.

I sit with my feet flat on the floor, knees together, and teach the rest of the workshop. The denim tight across the hips and seat, the boxers bunched and pressing against tissue that was not there this morning, the warmth at my crotch with each small shift of weight, the dampness I keep encountering and cannot stop encountering. My handwriting, when I write something down, looks like my handwriting. Same shapes. The pen in my hand feels slightly different though, something remote about its weight.

Brigit makes another sharp observation. I ask a follow-up and the room leans in and for a moment I'm not managing anything — I'm just running a workshop, doing the thing I know how to do, and the body is a fact I'm living in without noticing it.

Fifteen minutes left. I teach through them.

The room empties. I expect Carol to follow the others out but she doesn't. She hangs back while the rest of the students gather their things and file past, and when they're gone she's still there, standing by her chair with her notebook pressed against her chest.

"Hey," she says. "Do you have a minute?"

I need a bathroom. I need a stall and a few minutes alone and I need them now. But her face — the same author-expression from earlier, braced and pale, but underneath it something rawer, the expression of someone about to ask for something they've had to work up to.

"Sure," I say. "What's up?"

She sits back down. "The death scene. The door thing." She looks at the notebook in her hands. "My advisor said something similar last month and I've been — I don't know. I've been avoiding it because." She stops. "The way she died. It wasn't simple. I don't know if I can write it the way it actually was, and the Opal isn’t making it clear."

I settle back in my chair. The jeans seam is pressing where it's pressing and the warmth below my waist is what it is, and Carol is sitting across from me needing something real, not reassurance exactly, more like permission. I've had this conversation before, or versions of it. I know what she needs to hear.

"The complexity is the essay," I say. "The way it actually was is exactly what you should write."

She looks up. "What if I can't get it right?"

"You're asking the wrong question." I lean forward slightly, elbows on the table. "Nonfiction isn't about getting it right. It's about getting it honest. Those are different things."

She nods, slowly. She's taking this in.

I watch her face and what I feel in response to it — the looking-to-me, the need, the way her eyes are on mine waiting for the thing that's going to unlock something — is familiar and not familiar at the same time. I've felt this pull before in these situations. Before this week I knew what it was: a professional satisfaction, wanting to be the person with the thing she needs. Sometimes, underneath that, something warmer than professional — she's not bad-looking, Carol, and there's an intimacy to this kind of conversation, the writer exposing where she's stuck and trusting you not to make her feel foolish for it. I've felt that warmth before and managed it easily enough.

What I feel now is the same pull and underneath it a completely different current. What rises in response to her looking at me doesn't pool in one place. That was the old warning system — concentrated, embarrassing, manageable. This warmth is everywhere south of my ribs and it doesn't announce itself as anything. It is a pressure under my belt. A slight ache in the crease where the thigh meets the hip. A thickness in my breath. I'm talking about her father and the death scene and I am also, in a different register of attention, aware of the seam of my underwear. It is not discreet. Nothing about it is discreet. It is just quiet. I keep my voice level and talk her through it.

She notices something. I can tell by the way her eyes move off my face for a beat and then come back. She thanks me, gathers her notebook against her chest again, and leaves.

I give it a count of thirty, then I pick up my bag and walk down the hall to the men's room. Far stall. Door locked.

I push the jeans and boxers down and look.

Female. Completely. I sit back on the toilet seat because I'm going to lose my balance otherwise, and then sitting makes it worse — the seat is the wrong shape under hips that weren't here an hour ago, and there is pressure from below I can't name because I have never sat on a body like this. The hair is lighter and sits higher than mine did. The outer lips are warm against each other where they meet, and the inside of my thighs is damp where they didn't used to be. I touch once with one finger, carefully, and the tissue is softer than I would have expected and it has two temperatures — the surface warm, something underneath the surface warmer. I can't find the clitoris at first. I know where it is supposed to be and my finger doesn't find it. It is under something. When I do find it, more by accident than by design — a small hooded shape that gives under pressure — the signal is not a bright electric flare. It is nearer to a startle. I pull my hand back fast, not from the sensation itself but from the sense that I have been too direct with something that does not yet belong to me.

Someone comes into the stall next door. I stop. I pull the jeans up. The denim catches on the new hips and I fight it standing, half-balanced, and the toilet paper dispenser bangs against my knee.

I look in the mirror on the way out. My face. The jaw I've always had, two days of stubble. Below the neck, under the heavy Carhartt that now pulls visibly across the hips, something else entirely.

I walk to the bus stop. The jeans grip my hips with each step and the boxers press and shift against the new tissue and between my legs there is a constant low signal registering the movement of fabric, and the fullness in the hips and the ass and the lower center of gravity tips my walk into something I'm not directing. My shoes are loose around the heel. My feet are smaller.