Until After

by Crystal K.

You and I spend the night together from junior high into our twenties. Best friends and bandmates, we share a bed. When our families joke their boys are dating, we laugh shyly. We have no words for winter nights, me stripped to my underwear and you—my big spoon, my fire. No words for how I moved into you, the goosebumps, the girl I was.

Did you see her? Did you love her? Even now, I can’t hear you.

. . .

“Don’t read that book,” Trish says.

Days from dating, I thumb the short shelf to learn her. The First and Last Freedom, a cover declares. The writer intrigues me more—an older Indian woman with neckerchief and Mona Lisa smile. A high school senior gave Trish the book before the kid was arrested for running through town naked as the self-proclaimed second coming of Christ.

I can’t not read the book. Trish insists the writer is a man, but I won’t believe it. We laugh when I pretend to shed and streak.

“You and Trish aren’t on the same level,” you say after band practice. What’s there to appreciate except her body?

I don’t blame you. Our love exists in the margins, where it can. Our sleepovers stop until a line from the book opens me.

. . .

“She’s like a dude, but hot,” I’m told before meeting Jackie. At a basement show, I’m supposed to wingman while our drummer makes a move. Other than heart-shaped faces and wearing black clothes, eyeliner, and fishnets, the friend and I have nothing in common. Still, I stammer. I’ll confuse identification with attraction for years.

I retreat to our drummer and Jackie’s film debate. Interview with the Vampire is Brad Pitt’s best movie, she and I agree. Twelve degrees with six inches of snow in the street, we convince partygoers to stroll the block. Jackie and I lead the pack. Already, it’s us against the world.

Jackie and I are just friends. What do the words “Love is not exclusive” mean in practice? Like us, she enjoys philosophizing over coffee, at her place over snacks, alone together in the woods, a handhold away on a fallen tree trunk in the dappled light of an hour that could last forever.

You hear the door of possibility creak.

Trish hosts a movie night for friends, and six of us watch Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in a half circle. I’m feeling it when the trans character Z-Man shouts, “This is my happening, and it freaks me out!” We’re moving against any chance of normal, the happy ending. I’m excited, relieved—oblivious to the work of rewriting.

. . .

Jackie joins our band, and we write our first love song in my parents’ wood-paneled basement. I still have the recording of that practice. Before the 7-minute ballad begins, I’m startled by your voice.

“They’re all [Lev]’s songs.” You huff from the cello. No one laughs. Your frustration is clear. We used to agree on everything, and I can’t hear you that an interlude should be two, not eight bars.

“One, two, three … four,” Jackie’s voice shakes, violin in hand. She knows years-long relationships are collapsing, but not how gruesomely or how responsible to feel.

I strum sad guitar, mumble. The beat shuffles, jogs. Strings talk over each other, at, then with each other. We come together, bittersweet and beautiful, but we’re doomed. Infatuated with Jackie, our drummer is upset at me for swooping in. Trish and I are still dating, and you’re waiting for me to love you as I love her. What does it mean to be in relationship with any of you—all of you? Like the song, the agony lurches, surges, and plays far too long.

. . .

“I have something to tell you,” I say over the phone. Trish sobs the entire car ride to the park. “Jackie and I kissed.”

After a scream, Trish vanishes. The car’s silence blares, so I wander the woods. A mature kid would’ve broken up months earlier during a conversation about our differences. I don’t want to say no to her, but yes to an open love that feels possible and truer than anything.

Back in the parking lot, Trish carves rune-like curses into my car door. Seeing me doesn’t startle her. She hefts a cake-sized rock above her head and steps forward with purpose. Her vengeance is biblical. Blank, committed, she doesn’t seem to hear me before she hurls.

. . .

Rereading my old lyrics, I have to laugh at the kid not to cry. Longing for an imaginary girl whose face resembles their own and whose name means love? “I want to be you,” I go so far as to sing on our first record. A failure of imagination, a cis man couldn’t hear the echo.

. . .

Trish invites me over to try again. She won’t accept that I know what I’m doing, maybe because I don’t. “People are talking,” she says. “Who’s sleeping with who. It’s disgusting.”

Should I care? I’ve lost all my friends.

In tears, her mother stops me in the hallway about Jackie: “She’s not even pretty!” Trish shares my “free love” ideas, and her mother looks to me to explain compersion, a feeling without a word yet in my Middle America. As falsely monolithic as labels are, I need polyamory to speak.

Her mother’s eyes widen. I’m proselytizing, naked in the streets.

. . .

Our happening never happens.

You bond with Jackie. We kiss when saying goodbye. Why can’t you meet my gaze? You seem pained with an unnamed affliction. I struggle to feel the same about you both. We’re convinced our relationships have to be identical, equal, or it’s not love.

Doubt creeps in. I have plenty to go around. I hope I didn’t use the word mistake.

The band splits, and Jackie and I marry. For years, she criticizes herself for mistreating you and Trish. Committed to forgetting, I cut my hair and run away to Texas to study an artform I’m solely responsible for. As for Jackie and me, debate becomes damage until our love is a story of the past, where the person you loved is left behind.

. . .

We haven’t spoken in over a decade, and I still dream of you. Our conversations are bitter, impossible. I don’t get it right there, either.

All our friends are connected on social media. Not us. You’re still funny, irreverent, poignant, yet alone in your photos. I’ll do more harm reaching out, I think.

Out and in two loving polyamorous relationships, I’m grateful for what telling stories has taught me. We aren’t condemned to someone else’s narrative if writing means revision means transformation. I wish you, and kids like us, a lifetime of chances to know the power of queer love, the chosen family of our dreams, to walk beyond and beyond and beyond.

Crystal K. is a queer trans writer, chapbooks editor at Newfound, and author of the novel Goodnight. Their flash and poetry have appeared in Gertrude, Peach Mag, [PANK], Hobart, Anomaly, and elsewhere and have been nominated for Best of the Net. They write RPGs at Feverdream Games.