I just want a fucking pussy

I keep crying I want a pussy.

I was supposed to have one by now.

that keeps making me cry.

I was supposed to be recovering right now. I was supposed to be hurting I was supposed to be swollen and probably wondering why the fuck I ever wanted this while knowing exactly why I wanted it.

Instead I'm still here in the same body.

I hate writing that because this body has been so good to me in other ways. Estrogen changed so much. but never enough. My face struggled along

I take my underwear off.

I'm so fucking tired.

There are nights when I can ignore it completely.

Temporary can last a very long time.

I learned how to position my body so I wouldn't notice. I learned how to look at myself without looking there. I learned how to have sex while deciding, almost unconsciously, which parts of my body were allowed to participate in my own awareness.

That became normal.

I hate that it became normal.

I hate how much of being transsexual is becoming extremely skilled at tolerating things you should never have needed to tolerate.

Then I got my surgery date and something changed.

For the first time, I could look at what was between my legs and think that I wouldn't have to do this much longer.

I could forgive it because it was leaving.

I could almost become tender toward it.

You were a mistake, but you won't be here forever.

I had never been able to think about my body like that before.

I started saying goodbye.

I could count them.

Then somebody changed the number.

That's what broke me.

I had already started leaving this body behind.

Now I have to live in it again.

I know how dramatic that sounds because I'm still me. My body didn't suddenly revert. Everything transition has given me is still here. I can walk outside and live my life. I can laugh and work and write and fuck and complain about stupid shit and make dinner and be somebody's wife.

That almost makes crying about this feel more humiliating.

My life is good.

I still want to rip this thing off sometimes.

Both of those things live inside me without resolving each other.

I don't hate being alive. I hate that there's one part of being alive that still feels like somebody attached the wrong ending to an otherwise recognizable sentence.

I just want to close my legs and feel myself there.

That thought destroys me.

I want to lie in bed naked with my thighs together and have nothing trapped between them. I want my wife to touch me and for my brain to stay inside my body the entire time. I want to put my fingers between my legs and feel softness and an opening that belongs to me.

I want to bleed after surgery and somehow be happy about blood because the blood would mean something finally happened.

I want to be swollen. I want to hurt. I want to complain about dilation and get annoyed by the entire maintenance routine that I've spent years romanticizing because I've never been allowed to experience it. I want the indignity of recovery because at least the indignity would belong to the body I chose.

I want underwear to fit against me without anything needing to be hidden. I want to wear something thin without checking myself. I want to stop thinking about how I'm sitting. I want my body to stop requiring stage directions.

God, I just want a pussy.

I can't explain how bizarre it feels to envy women for something they're allowed to hate.

Women complain about their vaginas all the time. Periods and infections and discharge and smells and pain and sex and doctors. I listen and feel jealous. I've wanted mine so desperately that annoyance sounds luxurious.

I want to have a pussy long enough to become ungrateful for it.

I want there to be a day when I'm irritated because I have to dilate, and another day when I barely think about it, and eventually a day when I'm lying in bed scrolling through my phone with my hand between my legs because it's warm there and I don't even notice what I'm doing.

That's the future I keep crying over.

It's not some magnificent transformation.

It's boredom.

I want the privilege of being bored with my own vagina.

Instead my genitals have been one of the longest administrative projects of my life. Other people have had to discuss them. Doctors have discussed them. Insurance has discussed them. People have written letters about them. I've sat in rooms and answered questions about what I want done to them while trying to act like it's completely normal to need strangers to authorize the construction of a part of your own body.

I learned all the medical words because knowing the words gave me something to hold onto.

Vaginoplasty sounds manageable. Gender-affirming surgery sounds respectable. Bottom surgery sounds casual enough that I can joke about it.

None of those phrases describe sitting in bed crying because I want a pussy so badly that my chest hurts.

I feel nineteen again.

I feel like the girl who'd just started estrogen and kept touching her chest to see whether anything had happened yet. I remember how impossible everything felt then. Every woman I wanted to become seemed impossibly far away. I could see her sometimes, especially when I caught myself in a mirror at exactly the right angle. She'd appear for half a second and disappear when I moved.

I kept going because I believed she was real.

She was.

I'm her now.

That should make this easier.

Instead it makes the last distance feel unbearable. I've come close enough to myself that I can finally see exactly what's missing.

I wish I could reach backward and hold that nineteen-year-old girl because she thought estrogen was the beginning of a very long road and she was right. I want to tell her she becomes beautiful enough to stop asking whether she ever will. I want to tell her she gets married. I want to tell her she gets to wake up next to a woman who knows her body and loves it.

Then I'd have to tell her we're still waiting.

That's the part I can't stop crying about.

I promised her we were going to get there.

Every injection was part of the promise. Every appointment was part of the promise. Every horrible photograph where I could barely recognize myself was part of the promise. Every time I told myself to survive another month because my body was changing was part of the promise.

When I finally got the surgery date, I thought I'd kept it.

I thought I could finally tell every previous version of myself that we made it.

Now the date moved and suddenly I feel like I have to apologize to all of them.

I know I didn't fail them. I know a scheduling delay isn't some cosmic judgment about whether I deserve my body.

Knowing that does absolutely nothing to stop the tears.

There are feelings that survive being understood.

I'm experiencing one of them.

I miss my pussy.

I know how absurd that sentence is because I've never had her.

I miss her anyway.

I'd already made room for her in my mind. I'd imagined waking up and finding her underneath bandages. I'd imagined being afraid to look. I'd imagined finally looking. I'd imagined crying when I saw her. I'd imagined touching myself after I healed and feeling my brain go completely quiet for once.

I'd imagined standing naked in front of the mirror and having nothing left to mentally correct. I'd imagined eventually forgetting how badly I once wanted any of this.

Then I let myself believe those things were close enough to touch.

That was my mistake.

I stopped guarding myself against hope.

Now I have to put the armor back on after I'd already started taking it off.

I fucking hate that.

I hate being told I'm strong enough to wait because I already know I'm strong enough. Strength isn't the problem. I can survive another delay. I can survive another month. I can survive more appointments and paperwork and phone calls and whatever other stupid obstacle gets placed between me and an operating table.

I've survived much worse.

I don't want survival to be the standard anymore.

I want something good to happen to my body.

I want to wake up from anesthesia and know that while I was unconscious somebody finally corrected the thing I've spent years learning how not to see. I want my wife beside me. I want to cry when I finally see myself. I want to be afraid that it looks strange because everything looks strange when it's swollen.

I want to spend months getting acquainted with it. I want to learn my own body again. I want to complain about it. I want to laugh about it. I want eventually to stop writing about it entirely.

I want this essay to become embarrassing.

I want to find it years from now and barely recognize the desperation inside it because having a pussy has become so fucking ordinary that I can't completely remember what it felt like to want one this badly. I want future me to read this in bed with her legs tangled around her wife and start crying for the girl who wrote it. I want her to reach between her legs afterward just because she can. I want her to whisper that we got there.

Tonight I'm still waiting. Tonight I'm crying over something that doesn't exist yet and grieving a surgery that's still going to happen because grief doesn't care whether the loss is permanent. Tonight I don't want to make any of this beautiful.

I don't want another metaphor for transition.

I don't want to learn patience.

I don't want to become stronger.

I've been strong enough.

I've waited enough.

I've survived enough.

I just want to wake up and finally have the body I've already spent years making a home.

I just want to put my hand between my legs and find myself there.

I just want my fucking pussy.