She died trying to look at the moon.

Information trickled out on January 30, 2021. It began with posts online from her friends alluding to an “accident” and begging anyone in Athens to rush to Attikon University Hospital and donate blood. Reading these is still haunting: as hope contracts, so does language. Despair was palpable in their syntax. She didn’t have long. 

Soon, official news came in an official tone. Sophie Xeon, one of the most beloved electronic musicians of her generation, had died at the age of 34, only three years after she’d publicly come out as a transgender woman. She’d fallen from a three-story apartment building in Athens. She was trying to take a picture of the full moon over the city. 

Now, it’s January 30, 2023. Sophie has been dead for two years and I’m looking out of my window and into the night sky. Over the rubbery tiles of my neighboring dorm’s roof, over the evergreen trees feathering out from behind it, even over my upstairs neighbors hacking by their open window and flicking dead stubs into the evening, the moon is shining. It’s in its waxing gibbous phase: partway between a full and a half moon, all is clear but the leftmost sliver. The lit-up part resembles the visor of a motorcycle helmet. I could find out what the moon looked like for Sophie that night with a simple Google search, but I don’t want to.

Rainier Maria Rilke wrote, in his first Duino Elegy, that beauty is just the beginning of terror. I knew what he meant the first time I watched the music video for her song, “It's Okay To Cry.” I wasn’t prepared to witness that beautiful woman singing with her unaffected voice, or the way she stood with her shoulders and breasts bared, or those stark gray eyes that looked through me, or her so-called “masculine features” conferring an otherworldly beauty upon her. I vacillated in and out of full-screen view, looking away as the music swelled. Seeing our dreams realized isn’t always a happy experience. Envy is besides the point: possibility can hurt even more when we constantly have to talk ourselves out of better things to stay sane. Possibility met me as I was reconciling myself to the life of an awkward boy sprouting breasts in dark rooms. To have it demonstrated so inarguably that better things were possible, was an invitation to terror. 

And yet, it was an invitation to something better too. I stared at that beautiful woman dancing in the rain, her body like a searchlight: if beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, then what’s hope? Beats me. Maybe it’s this woman who died a senseless, unfair death, but who showed me a way of life that was new. She was never a bearer of false hopes. That’s where the terror came in: she didn’t proffer a life of natural self-love or even one of societal acceptance. What I saw, rather, was a transsexual life as unashamed as any cis one. One where transness is neither a defining factor nor an indicator of tragedy, but simply a quality that sits parallel to dignity. 

Even today, I have trouble looking at the video. Her death didn’t ease my symptoms. Other times, however, I wonder if forcing myself to return is necessary: after all, isn’t the dream achieved each moment I feel I can stand in myself? All happiness will come apart in time, but it can come back together again. It’s like meditation: the breath goes in, it’s savored, it leaves, it returns. That’s the only way I’ve learned to live. 

I’ve come closer to the ideal Sophie set through meditation than through anything else. Ron DeSantis can create a registry of all the Floridians who’ve received gender-affirming care. News outlets can declaim to the country that I am a groomer, a pervert, and a mentally ill deviant in need of out-of-pocket therapy. Anonymous Twitter users can cite statistics and tell me to follow them. The English government can block pro-trans Scottish legislation, and launder this decision through a rat-king of op-ed scribblers. I can get called a faggot in the street; I can get called a faggot at the Seattle Pride Parade, which was the first time I was ever called that word as a wohmun – maybe how I felt then was how Sophie felt when a reporter called her “he” on the Grammy red carpet – but my breath is mine until I die. 

I remember a day that feels like a lifetime ago; it was way back in the Trump era, but it somehow felt less dire than the present, our benevolent Marxist-Leninist-Bidenist regime notwithstanding. It was my first time out in the open world in women’s clothing: I went out on a walk around the neighborhood, my peplum top pinching at my armpits and ribcage. I was too nervous to attempt anything more feminine than a square little shuffle and shallow breaths. I returned to my house sweaty and paranoid and fell into my father’s embrace. “I’m so proud. So proud.” 

He released me from his arms. Either of us could have cried, but we didn’t do that. Instead, we gave each other a nod. I tried to pull out the creases from my blouse. They wouldn’t come out. 

Those kinds of feelings, the sort he or Sophie awakened in me, were never easy for me to handle, but they used to be more straightforward. This was when I was younger, and each love or hope contracted would throttle me like a little death. The lightest possibility — a brush of the arm, say, or a girl blowing me a kiss – brought on something between a claustrophobic panic and a great surge of joy. All I could do was excuse myself and sit in the dark. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was easier to parse. This nostalgia reminds me of my ex-Christian friends, who’ve admitted that, although they’re glad they left the church, they miss the certainty.

I was young enough to see this certainty in my father when he claimed that Jimi Hendrix, by his own admission, never stopped learning his instrument. Was he lying to restore my spirits after two hours’ plinking at Walk Don’t Run had left me sulking with my hand dipped in an ice bath? Possibly, but I don’t know how I could live my life if those words didn’t stick with me. Transition is perpetual – it only ends with life. I was born into a time of transgender supermodels and health secretaries, of pronouns in email signatures, of white-pink-and-blue flags in craft brewery windows, but our monuments are held together with scotch tape. The breath comes in, and then it goes out – and out – and out – and your chest starts to pinch –

Sometimes, before I put on a shirt in the morning, I make a note of how well they disguise the shape of my breasts. Lumpy sweaters or hoodies do this the best, of course. T-shirts? More risky, but passersby might assume that you’re simply out of shape. Tight button–ups? Proceed with caution. However, That’s hardly the only worry that comes up; as anyone who has suffered from anxiety is aware, it follows the Fibonacci sequence. My shirt will bunch up between my stomach and collarbone, and a seething, maternal voice within me begins the interrogation: Where will you be going? Should you modulate your voice? Is it safe to wear makeup? I’ve either become a preternatural vibe-reader, or afraid of everything and everyone. I know how to shrink and how to look masculine. I know how to forget that I ever saw that video and fold into myself like a dying star.

When asked about his memories of Sophie, her collaborator Vince Staples said, “She came to the studio when she was in [LA]. She was with [producer] Jimmy Edgar, and they had just gone to Disneyland. She popped up at the studio randomly in Mickey Mouse ears and a leather jacket on. It was 100 degrees outside — that’s the type of shit she does.” A faint smile passes over me as I recall those words until it’s displaced by more questions: namely, what type of shit do I do? All the paths that I’ve taken and will take are floating in the air like a million dust mites. My mourners will decide which ones are me and which should be left as fat on my corpse. Only death can make our lives coherent.

Coherent to a degree, that is. The human brain can write fugues and code computer chips, but it can’t comprehend death. Although we live in a time of innovation – of remote bombings, microplastics, and revenge porn – something is looming with all the bloated dread of a family secret: that death can’t be cured for the dead or the living. The real proof of this is in our dreams, in the corpses that stand up and walk within them: my dad lives when I close my eyes. My grandmother, my childhood pets, and my spoiled friendships live too, but it’s he who emerges with the greatest clarity (albeit one weakened by time, which tends to weld dream and memory at the joint). I remember the way he was dreamed just a few nights ago: he wasn’t shriveled and begging for ice chips like the last time we spoke, but positively strapping. He wasn't on a ventilator, just his usual household attire: a black graphic tee and chinos. I fell into his arms. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. He smiled.

“My beautiful daughter.”

And then, of course, I woke up. I remembered walking into his room at the University of Washington Hospital. The first thing he said when he saw me was, “That’s my daughter!” By then the heart attack, three clogged arteries, and liquid diet would have robbed him of his white lies and social pretensions. He would’ve only been able to call me that if he believed it. When he died just a few days later, he died having accepted and loved me. He’d been moved to tears just by the sight of me.

When I remember that day, everything stops. If I’m speaking to someone and I suddenly remember his thin, exposed abdomen, I have to cut off my sentence in the middle. In moments like these, climbing regressions like an endless staircase, I return to my old self: the one who’d only been taking estrogen for a few months, pausing the Sophie video to pace around the room. I think of all the times as a teenager when I considered sneaking off to a secondhand store and buying a dress. This time, it wasn’t the thought of men with bad intentions that stopped me – I was swarmed with different questions then, ones I’ve since tossed aside like baby shoes – it was the despair that I knew would grip me the moment I held the bag. Say that I bought the polka-dot gown of my dreams… what then? Would I prance down the boulevard winking at hunks? Please. It would be one more shameful secret. One more outline beneath my bed frame. I would make my desires too tangible.

The world of the tangible is frightening and unappealing. Sophie was tangible. The tears of my father, the ones he wasn’t physically strong enough to wipe away from his cheek, were tangible. This is the world I tempt in the Burmese position, counting my breaths. Each warm brush at my nostril’s edge is tangible. Just writing the word so many times makes me want to renounce it and become an otaku, or maybe a Pentecostal Christian. I’d be seeking the same effect.

In the world of the tangible, it is unfortunately January 30, 2023, and I’ve floated thoughtlessly into my roommates’ corner. They’re sitting criss cross on their beds, visibly stoned. I’m hovering over them, dealing smiles and nods as required. I glance up at the wall and see a poster of Sophie.

It’s a headshot and she’s looking straight into the camera. Bared shoulders, cascading red hair. The roommate who mounted it is giving a 101 course. I catch snatches- “Scottish producer… called herself ‘Sophie’ while presenting male… …came out in the most grandiose fashion possible…”

– but truthfully, I’m not there with them: I’m looking at her. She’s looking ahead. I still believe that it was her eyes, so much larger than I had ever witnessed them before, that set off the terrible shift that followed. I took a subtle step forward, barefoot on the beige-and-pencil-lead floor.

Then, I let myself look. Not at their beauty, fire, or bravery – those I registered as unconsciously as her hair color. This time, I looked and saw the eyes of a woman. A woman who, at the time of her death, hadn’t been ‘out’ much longer than I have. Whose solo career had just begun. Who expected to spend so many more hours in front of her midi keyboard. Who expected to spend so many more years with her partner, taking trips like the one they were on that very night. “...Rhianna, Charli XCX, Vince Staples…”

They were the eyes of someone who would have been scared to fall 3 stories. I went back to my room and sat on my bed. I jolted up. In the immediate aftermath of her death, I accepted the old platitude – she’ll live on through her music, I thought. No. Those eyes were beautiful, but they didn’t blink. There is no rebirth, just scarred feet straining to stay en pointe. Phoenixes aren’t real – all that’s real is tomorrow morning, when I’ll place a green tablet under my tongue and fold my arms over my breasts. Tomorrow, January 31st, when former president Donald Trump will post a video on Truth Social vowing, should he be elected in 2024, to prohibit any federal agency from “promot[ing] the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” It won’t matter that he's ugly, infirm, and debauched, that his job is murder and his hobby is rape. It won’t matter that artifice is oozing out of every corner of the video like oil through a strainer, playing the crowd with his little Tonight Show asides – “Can you believe that?” and “This is true, people!” It definitely won’t matter that there’s an American flag behind him. There’s no father waiting back home. Sophie has been dead for 2 years and a day.

We’re lying in bed. My boy’s head was just shaved for the first time, and he looks sharp as a tack. I tell him this and he laughs at me. Without thinking, I chose a dumb cliché to make him laugh. He fixes his brown eyes on me.

“I think I’m gonna take a shower."

The voice of my boy as I follow him into the bathroom, that gains new dimensions as it bounces off the floor tiles. His clothes under the sink, crumpled. Me, sitting on the closed plastic lid of his toilet, shifting gingerly from buttock to buttock, praying my weight doesn’t pop it out of place. My boy, stepping into the shower, carefully turning the tongue-shaped lever so that he isn’t frozen or cooked by what’s about to come out of the faucet. My boy beginning to lather pineapple-scented soap between his palms. My boy bending over to wash his feet:

That image: something happens to me. It begins slowly, with memories of paintings. They’re from the Renaissance, the bodies olive-colored and varnished. Jesus. I see his face. He’s washing mangled feet. I shake it off, even though I’ve never bought my own explanations for why things are absurd. But after the images scattered, there he was, whole and right. His back doubled over, a gesture of invitation. His eyelashes almost touching each other. His skin, soft and streaked with warm water, a sight that makes me want to weep. There I am, still shifting in my seat, looking across the room at my boy. I want to leap and gather him up in my arms. I want to let the water wash over my blouse so that it clings to me like a second skin, amplifying every crease of my breasts and the furthest extensions of my shoulders. I want to step out of the shower and walk out into the nearest street with him on my arm, knowing that we are no more right or wrong than the color of the sky. I want

“What’s up?”

I smile at him with uncreased eyes.

“Nothing.”