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The surroundings seemed quiet at first, other than the clanging of some object hitting another and a chilled wind that blew past. However, after laying on the cold and icy ground for another couple of moments, Ryan began to hear Min’s slow breathing. They squinted, the bright light of what he assumed to be the sun getting into his eyes. All of a sudden they heard a sharp gasp, then a loud and deep scream from Min. Startled by the sound, they jolted awake, a more high-pitched scream escaping him. He covered his mouth and turned slightly red. It had only been two months. There was not supposed to be much change in two months. Still, being around Min only brought back floods of envy that he could not understand in the past.
Everything had been just fine up until the seventh grade. The past year, they had spent every waking second together. Summers were jam-packed with unplanned sleepovers at Min’s house. They’d always start with grabbing lunch at Dumpty’s, then they’d play some music at his house, then Ryan would stay for dinner, and eventually he’d fall asleep next to Min as crickets softly chirped in the background.
They remembered the last sleepover they had, both of them giggling too much to fall asleep, shushing each other but only laughing more. Ryan laid back in Min’s bed, then shook his head, sat up, and took his long dark brown hair out of a messy ponytail.
“We really have to go to sleep,” Min said with a laugh. His voice was still equal in tone to Ryan’s, if not the slightest bit deeper. There wasn’t a big difference between the two of them.
“It’s not that late yet!” Ryan whispered, he still had yet to take off his bright red glasses. Min recalled the day Ryan showed up at his house with them on. They looked tired and dejected, awkwardly rubbing their neck.
“The red suits you, ______,” Min said with an awkward smile.
“Rock stars don’t wear glasses,” he quietly muttered.
“You’ll be the first.”
Min nodded, “fine, a bit longer,” he quietly laughed, coming slightly closer to Ryan. They grinned and stayed close to Min. The door cracked open, the artificial lights from the hall poured into the room. They both quickly pulled away and shut their eyes in an attempt to look like they were asleep. They both heard sighing and muffled speaking, then a distinct sentence that neither of them at the time would understand.
“It’s just not appropriate anymore.”
All of a sudden, the seemingly unnoticeable details between them were gaping holes. They weren’t allowed to have sleepovers anymore, the door stayed open three inches when they hung out in Min’s room, but the biggest difference was in Ryan’s figure.
He looked like he belonged on the cover of a magazine-- at least that’s what everyone said about him. Girls in their grade were envious, and Min couldn’t help but notice the number of guys taking notice of him. Ryan constantly shrugged everything off, not understanding everything going on. He started asking to cut his hair shorter, the answer was no. He started wearing looser fit clothes (though that wasn’t all that difficult, he already had a small frame). He was labeled as a tomboy, hard to get, and many other things that were neither compliments nor criticisms.
Meanwhile, Min had also begun to grow up. He grew taller, his voice got deeper. His hair was cut a bit shorter and was slicked back. He looked mature, though he still was painfully awkward. He began to give Ryan feelings that he neither wanted to accept nor understood. Everything that he’d felt during those years he reduced to a dumb crush. He hated going to pools with Min because he was “insecure”. He wanted his hair shorter because it was easier to manage and they were lazy. Various statements that leaned towards insults would stay in his head.
“She must be anorexic, look at how thin she is.”
“What are her parents doing letting her wear that? She has so much potential.”
Nothing made sense to them except for the fact that Min was perfect, and that they were not. Min’s low voice quietly sang in the background, tying perfectly in with the synth and guitar. Ryan’s voice stuck out, ruining the balance. He hated his voice, he stopped singing for a while, and one day Min questioned him about it.
They were sitting on a park bench together with a bag of oranges between them. Ryan held one in his hands and stared down at it. He was quiet that day, which was strange for Min. Usually, they were the one always filling a room with noise. Now they just sat in silence. Ryan sighed and dropped the orange back into the bag, then looked out at the rest of the park.
“Do you not like oranges?” Min asked while peeling his.
Ryan glanced over at him, then looked away, “I’m not hungry.”
They let the uncomfortable silence settle for a couple of seconds before Min broke it, “Hey, ______?”
“Yeah, Min?” He sat up slightly.
Min blushed and stared at the grass, “Why do you never sing anymore?”
They were sixteen years old, and they pretended the only thing on their minds was music. Min omitted many embarrassing things in his question, like the fact that when he feels stressed it’s Ryan’s loud and powerful voice that calms him down. Without their voice, it seemed like there was a part of them missing. He still had his lopsided grin and bright shining eyes, but nothing could ever replace the boldness of his voice.
“I don’t know,” was the only thing they could think to say in response, because he wholeheartedly didn’t know. It was just another item added to the list of things he was uncomfortable with but never understood.
“I miss it,” Min finally said, looking over at Ryan, “it’s really pretty.”
Ryan made eye contact with Min and softly smiled, “thank you.”
They were sixteen years old when Ryan got his first boyfriend. He was kind, a pretty good person overall. He started wearing crop tops and skirts to school, and soon the label ‘slut’ was added to the group. He wore winged eyeliner every day and red lipstick whenever something important was going on. Because he was Ryan, Min was enticed by every little thing he did. When he saw him with some other guy he wanted to scream: “Hey! Why don’t you see me! I noticed you before they did!” as if he was being treated like some object by the many guys in their grade. Though it pained him, Min held his tongue throughout everything. Not only could he accidentally ruin their friendship, but Ryan also seemed happy. That, or he was excellent at covering up just how uncomfortable he was. Min didn’t want to believe the latter, even if it made him accept that other people could make Ryan just as happy as he could make them.
Ryan never talked about the list he had in his head, not even to Min. Looking back on it now, it was simply a list of things that caused dysphoria. They were in the wrong to try and correct everything, but he didn’t know what else to do. He had been taught that his behavior was one of an insecure teenager. Since that didn’t line up exactly with the rest of Ryan’s personality (or the one of a rock star), he needed to become just as confident in those things as he was in everything else.
They were eighteen years old, and the battle of the bands was approaching. Min and Ryan had worked endlessly on writing a song that would wow everyone. Ryan was going to be the lead vocalist. They tried to forget that.
“Chicken Choice Judy’s gonna wow the stage!” Ryan yelled as he hopped up from Min’s couch, nearly bumping into his worn coffee table. He had a wide grin on his face, eyes lighting up like stars in the night sky.
“It’s just… not a proper band name,” Ryan’s expression quickly faded.
They wanted that to be their big debut, the kick-off to their tour on the road. It’d just be the two of them, their instruments, and his dad’s old beat-up van that Ryan learned how to drive in. Them and music, no confusing and conflicting feelings taking over and consuming their lives.
Instead, it was a harbinger to a painful year apart, neither of them apologizing or even saying goodbye. The dreams they had had since they were children were muffled, the flame that Ryan thought was eternally burning was blown out with a whisper of doubt. Ryan picked up his diploma from the office once he was done with his last final. He’d miss the last few days of festivities, but he didn’t care. It was either coming to some half-assed class party feeling the same gut-wrenching feeling he felt onstage every time he saw Min or starting his journey early. Though he knew even as he ran away, he’d never get over the feeling of hearing his voice amplified throughout the auditorium. It was something he thought he’d always wanted, but all he could hear was the fact that something felt wrong.
Being out on the road was a time to experiment, because the best time to try things is whenever you’re all alone and no one can get pissed at you for making the wrong decisions. Ryan remembered his first girlfriend like they had gotten together yesterday. He was playing at a college party, his strange-sounding voice getting mostly drowned out by drunk teenagers. They eventually got tired of singing and switched to just playing instrumentals. They zoned out, all the noises and colors fading into a blur. He remembered the snap back to reality when she placed her hand against his cheek, and her voice somehow stayed soothing though she had to yell over the party. They made out in the bathroom, and for the first time in a while, something felt right.
He’d heard plenty of stereotypes about lesbians, mostly that they usually acted more masculine. Ryan concluded that he was a lesbian and that his love for Min was an attempt at normalcy-- when in fact it was the only thing that wasn’t. They broke up eventually, but it didn’t take long for him to find someone else.
He began to cut his hair himself, it seemed to get shorter and shorter instead of growing out. They did a messy job with cutting it, but it remained passable. He started wearing looser clothes again and didn’t dare to wear things like skirts and crop tops. They rarely wore anything but stage makeup or some simple eyeliner he used the van’s mirror to put on in the early mornings before driving for hours on end to get to a gig. They accepted that things didn’t have to make sense and that they could simply ride out the waves, but their gigs grew to be less and less respectable, and they had gone through two breakups in the past eight months. He sighed and banged his head on the horn of the van, instantly pulling away because of the loud noise.
Their third girlfriend changed everything. They met in a gas station parking lot, she was smoking a cigarette and noticed Ryan’s disheveled and tired-looking appearance. While filling up the van with gas he started to dig for any loose cash he had, realizing that he didn’t have any gas money. They groaned and buried his face in his hands, sitting on the dirty concrete with his back pressed up against the van. The smell of smoke got stronger and he looked up, coughing slightly. The girl was putting loose change from her wallet into the machine until the gas was fully paid for.
“Wh-- What?” Ryan looked up at her and tilted his head.
She knelt beside him and dropped a cigarette and lighter in his hand, “you look sad.”
He remembered the day where everything clicked into place. He was touring the aisles of a gas station, looking for some sort of food that was cheap enough for him not to feel bad about buying but also gave him enough energy to run off of for the next day or two. There was a clinking too quiet for him to hear from dropping some change on the ground. He heard a deep voice come from behind him.
“Excuse me, sir, you dropped some money?”
Ryan tensed and turned around, “what?”
He stared down at their small feminine frame, “I’m so sorry-- miss.”
He remembered the strange disappointing feeling whenever the kind man called him miss, and the strange exhilarating feeling when he was called sir. Like everything fell into place and the singular word was the last piece of a puzzle. They paid for some peanut butter crackers, the word still lingering on his mind. Their heeled boots tapped against the concrete, the sound creating a rhythm to the overwhelming thoughts swirling through his head.
“Is everything okay?” his girlfriend asked as she pulled the gas pump out of the van.
Ryan blankly stared at her, “I got called sir.”
That was all he said at first because that was the only thing he could think about. Years of experiences collided and created a big bang in his skull, like there were now entirely new universes to explore. They held the crackers in his hands but suddenly didn’t feel hungry anymore.
It was the first time Ryan had cried in a long, long time. All the sudden years of denial and dysphoria came pouring out, and he couldn’t stop it. His girlfriend held his hand throughout the whole thing, listening closely to every word that they said. She took the wheel as Ryan stared into the void in the passenger seat, holding the now crushed to pieces peanut butter crackers that he’d purchased from the grocery store. His girlfriend pulled into a parking spot at a Walmart and told Ryan to wait in the car. Twenty minutes later, she came back holding a plastic shopping bag and placed it in Ryan’s hands.
“What’s this…?” he asked, he had stopped crying long ago, but his eyes were still red and puffy.
She smiled, “it’s a binder, go try it on,” she said, gesturing to the back seat.
Ryan could never truly repay her for everything she did for him. She made him finally realize who he was, and she made sure that he’d be proud of it. After paying for six months of hormone therapy, she broke up with Ryan. It had to be the most satisfying breakup Ryan had ever gone through, they stayed friends afterward and the reason why she ended it was that she couldn’t picture a relationship with a guy. The last time they ever interacted was a tight hug that Ryan gave her as he dropped the keys to the van into her hands.
She stared at him, then down at the keys, “Ryan-- I can’t take this,” she said with a laugh. She tried to push them back into his hands, but he balled them up into fists.
“Please. It’s the only thing I can give you,” they smiled with tears in his eyes. The van was a reminder of everything that happened that year. The lonely nights where his stomach felt so empty yet he couldn’t bear to eat. All the times he grew sick of hearing his voice and rethought if he could perform music at all. The break-ups, the half-assed songs, and the lost dreams that he once shared with Min--
Only, he wasn't ready to give up that last thing yet. He hopped on a train going to Powell Lake, and for the first time in over a year, he was going home.
It was almost ironic that the first place Ryan went once he came home was Min’s place. Most people would call it a home away from home, but when your house is full of siblings screaming over each other and you can’t remember the last time you were recognized for something, it’s hard to call your house home. Ryan skidded to a stop when he saw the most familiar figure he could imagine inside the Dumpty’s. He slowed his pace while trying to catch his breath, but had to rush to the door when he saw Min closing. He shoved his foot into the crack between the cool indoors of the diner and the warm outdoors of a Powell Lake summer.
It took a second for Min to register why the door wasn’t shutting, he stared down at the ground, seeing a heeled boot. His eyes went up the person’s leg, torso, and finally reached their face. He furrowed his eyebrows, then his eyes widened.
“______?” The fact that it rolled so easily off of Min’s tongue used to be comforting. As if Ryan’s dead name was the hardest thing in the world to pronounce and Min was the only one who could say it right. Now, it was like a stab in the back, like everything that had happened the past months was all for nothing.
Ryan awkwardly laughed, playing off whatever negative reaction he had, “It’s actually Ryan now.”
Ryan could almost feel Min’s piercing grey-blue eyes staring down at him, “Oh-- I’m sorry, Ryan.”
Just like that, Ryan had fallen in love with him again. It felt like a beautiful symphony blending together as he said his name. The tickets to New York felt heavy in his jacket pocket, but apparently, their unresolved conflict was heavier in the eyes of a magical train.
People tended to compare dysphoria to wearing the wrong shoes on the wrong feet. It feels strange when you’re walking around, but if you’ve been sitting down for a while you could almost forget about it. The equivalent of what Ryan felt once he stood up, ice crunching beneath their feet, was similar to the feeling that someone would feel after sitting down with swapped shoes for months and then deciding it was a good time to run sprints.
The first and most noticeable thing was the fact that he was no longer wearing his binder. He didn’t know how or when it was taken off, or even where it was. Along with the fact that his normal clothes were missing, it seemed that they had been replaced with a standard grey jumpsuit with a small logo. Things were only made worse by the belt around his small waist because it defined his feminine hips. They covered a bit of their torso with his arms, clearly feeling uncomfortable. They were uncomfortable enough to not notice the strange fish people and the talking diner bell in front of him. They stayed silent for a second, listening in to the conversation so they could jump in.
“Pretty rad boots though,” he glanced down at them, they were probably the only thing at the moment that wasn’t causing intense dysphoria. Min took a second to look at Ryan, his eyes scanning him once, twice, and one more time. They tensed slightly, taking a step back.
Min looked utterly dumbfounded, still extremely confused about what was going on. However, he knew (even though they didn’t dig into it too far) that Ryan was probably not feeling good at that moment.
“I’m… sorry,” was all Min was able to say before looking back over at the bell.