Transitioning
is often met with the assumption
that something will harden.
A voice, maybe.
My posture.
The way I move through a room.
They speak about masculinity
like a material that sets in place
cement like,
cooling steel, even.
But transition
was less about hardening
and more about translation.
The body learning
to translate its own language.
The quiet relief
of hearing someone say he
and feeling
the word finally
belonging to me.
Something shifted then
not a transformation
into someone new
but a transfer
of meaning.
What stayed was something sapphic
not in the narrow sense,
not woman-loving-woman,
but in the way I show up.
The way I notice
when a friend’s voice
gets smaller around the edges.
The way I make a room feel safe
before I’ve said a word.
I brought that with me.
People talk about masculinity
like it requires distance,
like softness cannot survive it.
But masculinity, I learned,
is something that can transform.
It can carry gentleness.
It can transport memory.
My life did not become harder.
It became
more transparent
the truth of me
finally visible
in the light.
Now when I say
I am a man
I mean something
slightly different
than the world expected.
A masculinity revised
by survival,
by tenderness,
by the quiet knowledge
that crossing a border
does not erase who you were
it changes
the meaning of arrival.
