I have my first martini in a bar called the Corner Office in Denver, three months after I turn twenty-one in 2011. For her twenty-first birthday in August, Ana invites me out to celebrate. I only know good martinis are dirty—like good sex, right?—so I’m none too keen on the Corner Office, being a martini bar, but Ana’s paying.
Ana used to have a different name—well, she used to have a different gender. I don’t know that yet. For all I do know, as I choose the sweetest martini on the menu when the server arrives, Ana is my former middle school boo thing whom I broke up with because I wanted to be single for high school.
Not my proudest moment. But hey, being fourteen isn’t about being nice.
“I’m glad you’re doing well!” I exclaim after Ana tells me about her new job and plans to return to school. I order a second martini, again sweet, again stronger than necessary.
“Thank you!” Ana replies. She’s looking flushed, too. “I feel like it’s going to be a good year. I’ve been getting more comfortable with my coworkers calling me by my preferred name, too. And that was a big step.”
I hear her. I know what she said. It still hasn’t clicked that Ana is transitioning. As I take another sip from my glass, I quickly scan her appearance. Nothing looks different (her hair is longer, but so what), except she wears a choker made up of two translucent ribbons: one pink, one blue. When they overlap, they look purple. Then it clicks.
“What did you decide on?” I ask, trying to pretend I’ve known the whole time. I don’t know if this is helpful. Probably not.
“Ana.”
“Nice.”
My relationship with Ana, ever since I broke up with her in 2004, has been a little weird. She wanted to stay friends, perhaps get back together, but we had nothing in common. She stayed in my life on the periphery for a few more years, but I started putting distance between us because (and no, I’m not proud of this either) I felt as if she wasn’t going anywhere in her life. She seemed stationary while I was jumping from Colorado to Illinois and back again, trying to be great.
Yes, it was elitist. Yes, it was presumptuous. Yes, I should check for that prejudiced thinking in the future. Like right now, as I order my third martini.
Have I been distancing myself from Ana because A) we don’t have anything in common, B) her life appears stagnant, or C) at the end of every interaction I’ve had with her since we broke up nearly a decade ago, she insists on rekindling our sexual history?
Oh. C. Yeah, that’s it.
The last time I saw Ana before tonight, I lied to her. It was two years ago, August 2009. She had come over to my mother’s house to listen to me read Joyce Carol Oates’ My Heart Laid Bare, a novel I loved from high school. She had given me a first edition copy at end of my first year of college. Halfway through the first chapter, she kissed me. I was nineteen, sexually inexperienced, emotionally unstable, still in the year of trying to kill myself (unsuccessfully, passively, lazily). Since July 2008, I’d been raped three times. In response, I’d smoked five packs of cigarettes and consumed at least fifty gallons of alcohol. When Ana kissed me, I assumed she just wanted to hook up. Next thing, bye-bye to her virginity.
The sex was bad. I didn’t really want it. She was uncomfortable in her body. She just wanted to please me, but no one had done that, pretty much ever. I didn’t know how to guide her, didn’t know how to guide myself. I said she’d given me seven orgasms. It wasn’t the first time I’d lied to a partner about my pleasure, but it’s one of the only times I remember doing it.
Ana stops drinking so she can drive me home, but I’m hitting the apple martinis twice as hard. Am I secretly transphobic? How have I never asked myself this question? As a Black woman, I need to examine all the ways I experience oppression and privilege, especially as an educated, employed cis woman.
When Ana drops me off at home an hour later, she asks for a kiss. I’m drunk—seven martinis in three hours does not a very merry Monica make—but I’m lucid. Enough.
“What?” I say, feigning confusion. We’re in the front seat of her white Honda. It’s the same car she picked me up in five years ago when she first got her driver’s license. The seats are the same. The radio tuned to the same indie rock station that was all the rage when we were kids. The cigarette lighter still not working. Did we make out in this car before? Seems likely.
“A kiss,” she repeats. “Can I have a kiss?”
My brain screams, Hell no! but instead, I say, “Oh, honey, I don’t think so.”
“Why not? We’ve kissed before.”
There it is. Again. This is why I don’t go out of my way to see or spend time with Ana. This moment right here. I stopped being sexually attracted to Ana long before the transition started. And frequently, people, but men more often, have used our shared sexual history against me. They play on my pity for them to get me to kiss them, suck them, fuck them. It’s a combination of my lack of self-control, lack of sobriety, and lack of excuses (even though a no should suffice) that all too often has left me naked in the backseat with an unlikely partner.
But not this time. If Ana is a woman, and she is, then her response hurts more. Operating under the assumption that womxn are all supposed to be on the same side as we fight patriarchy and misogyny and gender-based violence, Ana using our sexual history as a weapon feels like a betrayal.
What the fuck?
She looks at me expectantly, half-smiling as the moment extends. Resentment surfaces briefly, then leaves with my response.
“I’m not attracted to women, Ana.” Another lie.
Her face falls. She bites the inside of her cheek and clears her throat. “Oh, well, okay then. I guess that’s fair.”
For a moment, I almost do it—almost kiss her. There’s a surge of guilt. The imaginary idea of closure and pity wells up inside me. I almost lean forward and put my tongue in her mouth.
But that’s just as bad, isn’t it?
❦
Over the next six years, Ana continues her transition. She starts dating a Black girl who loves to read, and the narcissist within me thinks she’s trying to replicate our relationship. My cis woman privilege won’t let me not believe that. It’s embarrassing—why must I be the center of every ex’s universe, as if once I broke their heart, they must find someone like me to replace me? My life is not a pop song, I remember as soon as my jealousy starts listing all the ways Ana’s new partner is exactly like me. Why do I care who Ana’s dating if I didn’t want to date her?
It’s toxic masculinity swimming in my poor circulation. Ana’s transition and continued attraction to me aren’t the first situation to make me question my own sexuality. It happens every time someone comes out to me who favors my gender identity, when a pretty girl hits on me at a bar, when my best friend Renée jokes about marrying me if her husband dies. Something about narcissism and internalized misogyny makes me want everyone to want me, even if I don’t want everyone. How many times have I convinced lesbians at burlesque shows that Renée was married to me, despite her huge wedding ring and my bare left hand? How many times have I soberly made out with a woman I was truthfully attracted to but didn’t want more from? How many times have I given lap dances and strip teases for women at parties, flirted with them while Drake’s “Practice” or Tinashe’s “Company” pounded in the smoky dark?
Something about Ana sparks frustration and confusion within me. I want her to be happy and I want her to live a full and safe life—but I also don’t want to be her friend. Ana will move on with her life, while I’ll keep distancing myself. And I’ll keep asking the same question: am I transphobic?
To some degree, yes. I’ll never truly understand the oppressions trans folks face through being part of those identities. White people are all inherently racist because they benefit from racism and can choose not to do anything to limit those benefits and privileges. It doesn’t mean that all white people participate in racist speech, actions, or legislature. But it does mean that they will never fully understand the oppressions faced by people of color because they can’t.
Even though my experiences of marginalization as a Black woman are similar to Ana’s as a gay white transwoman, they are not the same. She isn’t of color, and I am not trans.
Yet my inherent transphobia, though acknowledged and actively fought, is not the reason I don’t want to be Ana’s friend. I have (and yes, I already know how this sounds) plenty of trans friends. That’s not the problem. It’s that I will always consider her an ex, while she will always think of us as friends.
During a particularly bad bout of depression, I bought a copy of The Sims 3 to distract myself. One of my Sims, Darius, starved to death. It was an accident. When I raised him from the dead (through a five-hour nonstop session in which I finished two bottles of wine and killed my phone battery researching ways to bring a ghost back to life), I tried to get Darius to marry his widow again. Thanks to forums of obsessed gamers like me, I learned that they need to become “just friends” first; then they can progress to romantic interests, then partners, fiancés, spouses. Otherwise, they would be forever exes.
Exes can’t be friends. The Sims proves it.
I still think of Ana as an ex, an ex whose priorities don’t match mine. And in this moment, sitting beside her outside my childhood home, the flashbacks of every partner who’s dropped me off here flood in—every goodnight kiss they expect, ask for, coerce, force. Though I’m confident Ana has little or no desire to harm me, the familiar distress reappears. Why not? We’ve kissed before.
I don’t want to kiss her, so I don’t. I say goodnight, get out of the car, and go into the house.
***
Ana will continue to try to keep our friendship alive, and I will indulge her to an extent. She’ll participate in my graduate thesis interviews; I’ll go to coffee with her and her Black girlfriend; she’ll try to see me over holidays.
But this is the last time I’ll choose to be alone with her.
I restrict her from my social media posts. I don’t tell her when I move back to Denver, or when I move away. I avoid all possible plans. As I get older, home feels less like a nostalgic reunion and more like a burden for which I need safety plans and constant support to endure. This has nothing to do with Ana, but her presence in Denver makes me less interested in returning there. I believe this distance is less cruel than making plans with her and breaking them, or admitting I no longer trust her—right?
No. No, it’s not.
The end of our friendship comes in January 2017. Ana initiates contact, as always, and asks two questions:
1. She’s getting married (same woman as before); do I want to come?
2. If I do want to come, do I want to be in the wedding?
I still think of her as an ex. If I were Ana’s fiancée, would I want Ana to invite her ex to not just be at the wedding, but also to stand beside us at the altar? I tell myself: I’m doing this for Ana’s fiancée; I’m just considering that woman’s feelings.
That’s not true. I’m doing this because I don’t want to be in Ana’s life anymore, and this seems like the most direct way out.
I say thank you, congratulate her on her pending nuptials, and decline both offers.
Every time I have a martini, my tastes now more refined, I think of Ana. I rarely order them. My drink of choice is gin and diet tonic with a lime and dash of bitters. No one makes this properly except the first person to introduce me to it—a fiction professor in my graduate program—and I never order it at bars, content to drink what I don’t want if it means avoiding a hard conversation. This is less cruel, right? Right?
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