The Dream in Which My Body Became a Woman

It was another October afternoon, one of those when the wind pushes people toward their homes and the sun gives up early in the west. Adrián walked briskly against the cold, his hands buried in his pockets and his head down, as if that made all he was carrying a little lighter.

His boarding house was on the top floor of an old building in the San Telmo neighborhood. A narrow room, with a huge bay window that served no purpose except to let the cold in, a tiny bathroom, and a bed that creaked if you so much as looked at it. The kind of mess that accumulates when a man lives alone and stops caring who might see him.

When he went in, the room greeted him dark and icy. Before the full weight of loneliness could fall on him, he let himself drop onto the bed without changing, the exhaustion of the whole day still stuck to his back. He popped open a beer that had been sitting half-finished on the nightstand for days, lukewarm and flat, and drank it in slow sips.

He was thinking about the usual things. About the years that had slipped away from him. About the love he had had close at hand and let slip through his fingers, about the few bodies he had known and remembered with a mix of tenderness and rage. They were few, but they were worth more than the whole life he was living now.

He remembered a girl from college who had taught him to kiss without rushing, and an older neighbor who had sought him out two summers in a row and then vanished without an explanation. Every time he closed his eyes, those bodies came back, those smells, that feeling of being wanted that now seemed as distant as another life. The lukewarm beer didn’t help, but at least it warmed his chest a little.

That night, though, there was something different in the air. A dense stillness, like the kind that comes before a storm that never quite arrives. Adrián blamed it on fatigue and closed his eyes, thinking tomorrow would be another day identical to all the rest. He was wrong.

The moon came in through the bay window and was the only light in the room when he turned off the lamp. Adrián sank into that cold brightness and, without realizing it, his mind disconnected from the world. The last thing he registered was the chill of the sheet against his cheek. After that, there was nothing.

The first dream was erotic.

He was on top of a woman lying on her back, faceless, nameless, only body and heat. He rocked with each thrust and her breasts rose and fell to the rhythm he imposed. He felt her wet, open, willing. In the dream everything was simple: desire had no past and no guilt, only the sway of flesh against flesh.

What Adrián did not know, while asleep, was that his real body was responding. Slowly, a tide of sensation began to invade him. His sex hardened beneath his clothes, tight, uncomfortable, searching for space it could not find.

And then, without being able to explain it even inside the dream, his body began to change.

As the dream grew hotter and more vivid, as he felt the soft skin of his imaginary lover and the dull collision of the two bodies, a different heat ran under his skin. It was not the heat of desire. It was something deeper, as if a current were remaking him from within.

The hair retreated from his arms, his chest, his legs, leaving his skin clean and smooth. Waves of that strange heat rose and fell along his back. His muscle mass loosened, went away, left him lighter. He began to moan in his sleep, to whimper without waking, and little by little his voice became higher, more feminine.

The Adam’s apple in his throat sank until it disappeared. His skull narrowed, his cheekbones became delicately defined, his chin lost its hard line, and his nose grew finer. His eyebrows thinned on their own, his lashes curled upward. Everything in his face was being rewritten while he remained trapped in the dream, oblivious to what was happening.

Despite the increasingly high pitch of his moans, he did not wake. His ears became small and delicate. His skin took on an extreme softness, almost unreal. He lost height, lost volume. His hands, once broad and strong, slimmed down until they were fine and fragile, with long fingers and nails that lengthened on their own.

His arms thinned, his feet shrank inside socks that suddenly hung loose on him. And the moans kept coming, more intense, with that sensual, feminine register that dragged him helplessly toward the edge of pleasure.

His thighs rounded out, gained flesh, became soft. In his chest he felt a pressure that burned. His nipples hardened, the veins showed faintly beneath the skin, and fat gathered underneath until it took shape, lifting two breasts where there had been nothing before.

His spine shifted with a muffled crack. His hips widened, his ass rounded, and he felt his thighs part a little, giving him a silhouette of curves his body had never had. In the dream she was a woman giving herself over; in the bed, without knowing it, he was becoming one.

The T-shirt, once snug, now hung loose over his chest, and beneath the fabric the freed breasts moved with the rhythm of his ragged breathing. The pants tightened at the hips until the seam gave way in silence, defeated by a new shape.

Then came an emptiness in his stomach so strong it nearly woke him. It was as if something were liquefying his abdomen from within. His waist narrowed, hollowed at the sides, finishing the drawing of an hourglass figure that his dream seemed to celebrate with every thrust.

And that was what drove him to the end. In the dream, his faceless lover pressed him against her; in reality, his body contracted in a long spasm. He came with a sharp cry he no longer recognized as his own, while a sticky heat flooded his groin.

But even in that instant, as the orgasm ran through him, his sex lost size, softened, withdrew. Whatever was left of the man in him receded inward. His hips shook in small tremors that only made each movement more sensual, and between his legs the shape changed: what had been there sank away to make room for a soft fold, fleshy lips, a warm and new slit.

At the deepest level, in a place no eye could see, something finished rearranging itself. A tide of hormones broke loose inside him, coursing through him entirely, sealing the change. Adrián’s body let out a long breath and fell still, breathing slowly, while the moon continued to watch over him from the bay window.

***

He woke with the first light of morning, that gray, uncertain brightness that comes in before the sun is fully up. The first thing he noticed was the hair. A long, wavy mane fell over his face and gave off a sweet, feminine scent that did not belong to him. The second was the weight. A new pressure on his chest, two soft weights that moved when he breathed.

He sat up abruptly, heart racing. The T-shirt slipped off one smooth, hairless shoulder. This isn’t a dream. I’m still dreaming. It has to be that.

But the rumpled sheet was real, the cold of the room was real, and the voice with which he breathed, raggedly, was high and soft. He brought his hands to his face and felt the fine cheekbones, the delicate jaw, the fuller lips. He lowered his hands to his neck, his chest, and when his fingers brushed his nipples, a shiver shot up his spine that he didn’t know how to name.

That was when he noticed the detail. The small one, the impossible one. Between his legs there was nothing of what he had gone to sleep with. Holding his breath, fingers trembling, he reached down, expecting to feel the usual.

He did not find his manhood. He found softness. He found a wet heat emanating from a body that was now his and that he was only just beginning to know. His fingers slid over a warm fold and a shudder ran through him, unlike anything he had felt before, deeper, more diffuse, as if pleasure no longer came from one point but from everywhere at once.

He should have screamed. He should have run. And yet he stayed still, with his hand between his legs, discovering himself. He pressed lightly, explored the place where his fingers sank in easily, and a low moan escaped his new lips. I don’t want to pull away. That’s what scares me most.

The sun finally came up and painted his naked body gold. Adrián — if he could still be called that — lay back slowly against the pillow, breathing in short gasps and eyes closed, letting that hand keep learning what he now was. Outside, the city was beginning to wake; inside, he was only just beginning.

Far from any gaze, in the most intimate part of that newly minted body, an ovary released its first egg. The cycle had begun. But that, for now, was a story for another night.