Trans

When they moved into the building, my gray life found a focal point. What I didn’t expect was that point would end up consuming me completely.

The door opened, and Nadia looked me up and down with a slow smile. Behind her, Raquel crossed her arms. “Speak,” she said. “What do you want?"

Natalia only wanted to get waxed before going to the beach. She didn’t expect the hotel beautician to be so striking, or what she’d find under her robe.

I dressed to impress no one, or so I thought. Two guards stopped me with a smile that said they knew exactly who I was.

The first time I put on her lingerie and looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t know whether what I felt was shame or something completely different.

I had been preparing that day for months: the wig, the dress, the lubricant. I thought I was alone at the abandoned lookout. The guard disagreed.

When I lock the door, I open the drawer, take out the perfume he chose for me, and become who I really am. Only he knows.

To the world we were two friends at the bar. Only I knew I had a black thong under my joggers, and that he knew it too.

I spent twenty minutes on my makeup, put on the chestnut wig, and opened the hotel door when he knocked. I had been waiting for that moment for years without knowing it.

I got there before Daniela and a girl offered me a drink at the bar. I didn’t know that night we’d end up the three of us in bed, doing things none of us had planned.

I had spent months exchanging messages with him, unsure whether I would dare. Then the day came, and I climbed into the taxi with trembling hands and stockings in my backpack.

An ordinary man discovered that beneath his wife’s clothes lived another version of himself, ready to emerge when lockdown came.

When I told him I could call someone to keep him company, he went out to buy cigarettes. Thirty minutes later, Sofía came down the stairs in heels.

Thirty-one points. ELARA’s voice was already waiting for him: “Wake up, sweetheart. Today you still won’t be the man you’ve spent years believing yourself to be.”

I had never gone out dressed for the street before. That Friday I decided it was time: miniskirt, heels, and the year’s most crowded subway car. What happened surpassed anything I had imagined.

The first time I went to his place alone, my heart was pounding when I rang the bell. I didn’t know what to say. He opened the door in a wet robe and smiled.

Under her tight panties there was a bulge I couldn’t stop staring at. And he noticed. That afternoon I discovered something I could no longer pretend to ignore.

We’d been kissing in secret for months without anything else happening; that afternoon, with the bottle nearly empty, it was she who dragged me to the motel window.

I went down to the bathroom with my heels in my hand and still not understanding what it would feel like to spend an entire day going out as Luna on Bruno’s arm in that town.