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The date on the calendar is both too close and too far for comfort.
It's a month away, and, though it's nothing more than a pre-op, it feels entirely surreal.
He's happy about it. He's pretty sure about that, but it's muddled, buried under an ocean's worth of other emotions.
Duck doesn't know when he started feeling dread at the thought of the appointment. He doesn't know when the thin pieces of apprehension and fear started weaving themselves together in the middle of his chest forming a knot much bigger than it really ought to be.
Really, it all comes down to one thing.
Duck knows he's made the right choices at this point in his life. He's made mistakes before, gone in the wrong major, hid from Jane for years longer than he had to, but those are in the past. The choices he's made have ultimately lead him to the right path.
But he looks at the circled date on his calendar - no different than the other ones marking exams or meetings, but so much more significant - and the first words his mother ever told him after he'd told her haunt him.
Now, his mother's never been intentionally malicious. She's never been anything worse than neutral in that regard. But when he had first told her, it had been like chipping through a brick wall with his bare hands. Punching over and over and over and over, until his knuckles were bloody and broken, the bones little more than dust, with nothing to show for it but a slight dent.
To his suffering, his mother had only one response, "How do you know?"
He hadn't answered at the time, not the way he should have. Though he doesn't know now how to answer the question either. It wouldn't haunt him otherwise.
So Duck wonders how he knows. How he knows he's made the right choices. How he knows he's currently making the right choices. How he knows he wants this. How he knows he's not going to wake up in a month, in a year, in a decade with a fierce phantom pain in his chest and wonder to himself 'Why would I do this?' How he knows he's a man.
He knows all of these things are true. He knows them like he knows the backyard of his childhood home that he spent hours in every day of every summer before he grew too uncomfortable to be seen in the clothes he was put in.
He also knows there are reasons for why he knows these things. There just aren't words that go with them.
How do you explain the skin crawling feeling of your name never fitting right , yet answering to it anyway? How do you explain the grief of opening your mouth and having someone who's long dead say the words you want to say? How do you explain the backstabbing feeling of your own body betraying you, like getting stabbed over and over with a white hot blade determined to keep you conscious and feeling until the killing blow that never seems to come? How do you explain the first breath of air you get after drowning for years without even a brief respite to someone who's never had the chance to drown?
Duck knows he wants this. But he can't describe the feeling he's expecting to get from it.
It's going to make his life easier, no more layers, no more timing your days just right, no more trouble hiding.
He wonders what the foreign feeling of his chest will be replaced by. Numbness, realistically, but what else?
He wonders how he knows the numbness won't be as bad as the alien feeling he gets every time he looks in the mirror.
Duck knows he won't be able to answer until he's felt both things. He knows he probably won't be able to answer how he knew even after.
But he knows it'll be better, and as the weeks grow fewer, it's enough.