You lay half sprawled across your bed, naked, stretched ribs towards the ceiling. Daisy is in the living room. Polly is in the kitchen. You wish you could be alone rather than lonely. But here, these are your friends. They are your lovers. Their lovers are your friends and so on and so forth until you exist as a thread in this knot of writhing bodies that makes up the community. It’s frictionless as long as there’s enough sweat and lube, but you can’t hack it.

You’re down bad, not for lack of sex but for lack of something within that sex. There’s a Mountain Goats lyric here off Tallahassee, but you can’t remember the exact words and you can’t remember the song. You could ask Jenny, but Jenny would make you sit through the whole thing, turn it into an aspect of herself. Before you moved here you could have done that. It used to just be you and her, but then came Val, and from her came others, and now Jenny is just someone you date. Maybe that’s better. You yourself said that was what you needed.

Daisy laughs in the lounge as Polly shouts something from the kitchen.

You’re thinking of moving to Brighton. You’re thinking of moving to Paris. You’re thinking of moving to a lighthouse somewhere. You’re thinking of quitting your job. You’re thinking of doing a Masters by research. You’re thinking of working for BAE systems and buying a house. You’re thinking of becoming an activist and joining one of those occupation camps somewhere and not paying rent anymore. You’re thinking of describing yourself as hyper romantic and couch surfing until a new room pops up. You’re thinking of posting on 4chan again. You’re thinking of getting therapy. You’re thinking of masturbating for the second time today. You’re thinking of Jenny, always.

You must be the saddest woman in Glasgow, at least as a proportion of how little is actually going wrong. You turned thirty exactly two months ago, and you’re still here, sharing a house and dating around. Maybe this is forever. Would that be so bad?

If you were adult, human, and female, you could have children. You could return to that sense of structure and progress, clear developmental milestones, teachers telling your children when they’re doing well at school and by extension when you’re doing well at parenting. But you won’t get that. You can’t adopt while living like this. You can’t detransition because you know you can’t do relationships as a man. You aren’t getting a womb any time soon. Transness feels like an incomplete state of personhood to you but none of your friends agree, revelling in their own and each other’s gender-fucked bodies. This dysphoria itself makes you feel dysphoric when you see how happy even the smallest budding breasts makes a freshly minted trans women. You were meant to be cis and you were meant to be a woman, but instead you were born trans and you were born a man.

There’s nothing that gets you off anymore. You can’t remember if anything ever did. You are here because this is who you are, not because you like it.

You open your phone and hover over her name. Twelve years turn to ash in the space of one text.