shorthand

I'm going to tell you straight: this is a story with a happy ending, even if it's a story about a girl who wanted to be a boy. She thought they could run faster, and she knew they were allowed to kiss girls. She had wanted this since she was a child, since she was three and running naked in the mud.

She cried more tears for this than she did for anything else in her life, enough that she could have watered her flowers. But salt water burns instead of nourishes, and she may have burned her skin dry with tears.

She fought everything. She fought her parents; she fought dresses of silk and cotton; she fought the people who told her who she could and couldn't be. One night, she fought breathing.

So she ran away from home when she was eighteen, skipping college and taking the train out west. She saw an old lady hitchhiking in the sun once, halfway between Denver and Santa Fe, with this woman trailed by a cop who couldn't or wouldn't arrest her. She felt sick and stuck to trains.

One place she felt safest was a city on the bay, with lakes breaking up the buildings and a cement troll hiding under one of the stretching bridges. There were bars with expensive drinks, or bars like English pubs, or bars with pinball machines in every corner.

In one where everything was rather average, she met a girl who said, "I don't care what you are. Boy or girl, you are a person. And you are beautiful." And maybe she didn't say it all at once. She took her time, drawing it out slow and true. But the girl heard her words, and thought they were simple, those words saved her. She stopped taking trains, and she stayed in the one place where she felt safest.

Here's the happy ending. There's a lake with the sun setting against the water and a spray of mountains, the scent of campfire smoke mixed with driftwood and salt, and this girl who wanted to be a boy--safe, not fighting--just a person loving another person, in a beautiful place where they were safe.