Longreads: ““At last! This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” —Genesis 2:23
In the seventh year of our marriage, on a cold day in October, my husband called me into the bathroom.
He was lying in the tub with his head submerged, but he sat up as I walked in, water splashing over the side. He wiped his face but didn’t look at me. From the halting way he began, I knew he was telling me something he’d been trying to say for a long time.
I watched the water lap around his edges, blurring and dissolving him. After 10 years together, I was so familiar with his body it had become an extension of my own. I could bring my eye to each point of him and know how it felt: the smooth skin of his shoulder, the surprising delicacy of his collarbones, the softness of his brown hair.
He never hid it from me. That surprises people. They ask, “Did you have any idea?” They imagine me walking in on him gazing into a full-length mirror, dressed in my clothes. They imagine the screaming, weeping, gnashing of teeth. But it wasn’t like that. As soon as he found the words, he laid them at my feet.
“I want to wear women’s clothes.””