Our meet-cute was a local epic. It was a bright Saturday in September 2022, and I locked eyes with S on the 18 bus headed to downtown Oakland, California. We winked at each other’s outfits before magically stepping off at the same stop. They wore Converse high-tops and ripped jeans with a patch over the butt with their given name. I flaunted a bright-red button-down and a ceramic necklace of a scowling woman’s face. We were synchronized, heading to the same printmaking workshop, and once we were there, pretended to pay attention to the Gelli stamps and Speedball ink as we flirted. I was immediately drawn to S’s vivid sense of self, their laugh that carried across the room and their courage in showing up solo to a workshop in a new-to-them city. I felt a bold, confident side of myself take the wheel, and asked them to coffee immediately after the workshop.

Our nascent relationship swelled in the following months, and we went on dates to the shoreline, museum and a second-hand art-supply warehouse. We went to a nature-based poetry festival and sat at the base of an old tree, talking about how we liked to be wooed. They brought a bundle of chamomile the first time they visited my apartment; I brought a thermos of loose-leaf tea to them on their one-month T anniversary. The leaves had split from their strainer, coating our tongues in herbs as we sipped. It was clumsy but delicious.

By New Year’s, S had broken up with me. I was sad, but I understood. They’d just moved to the Bay, and needed to solidify their own community before they could feel comfortable diving into a deeper relationship. And I knew that I needed a lover who was ready to really claim and celebrate all of me if I was going to commit to a partnership. As a fat femme who was wary of intimacy and vulnerability with thin people, I was unsure if I was ready to let S be so close to me.

A year passed, and after much muddling and processing, S and I found our way back to each other. In the years since, we have cultivated a deep, trusting relationship across our differences.

S is trans, and their body has shifted and transformed as they’ve gone on and off testosterone. I have long-standing insight into some of that experience—the frustration of clothing stores not carrying cute things that fit, the indignity of family members’ comments about your body as it changes. Sometimes my empathy is clunky: a bruised, childhood side of myself feels exasperated at their surprise at how the world shifts when you get fatter. But I also know there are nuances to their experience that are personal, and that I’m not privy to.

Our unruly bodies continue to surprise me in their overlapping struggles. We each face barriers accessing public space. Before we go on dates, I’ve taught S to research weight capacities and seat structures. While chairs are usually not a problem for them, S pays closer attention to restrooms, gender designations and the vibes of the other guests. Will they give S a hard time, or will we be in the comfortable company of other gays with crazy haircuts? We’re familiar with each other’s food needs, our energy limits, our precautions around COVID. We advocate for each other in turn.

At the doctor, we both struggle to have our concerns taken seriously. S has dealt with long COVID and chronic fatigue, both of which are shrugged off by most medical providers. We buoy each other through the failures of the healthcare system, giving each other the silly, attuned bedside manner and procedural aftercare our doctors are seemingly incapable of. During one particularly frustrating virtual appointment during mid-summer vacation, S held hands with me under the table, stroking my pinky gently as the rest of my body tensed. Afterward, we jumped into the river outside and swam hard against the current, letting the water tangle our bodies together alongside the algae, discarded vape cartridges, empty water bottles and pebbles.

When I had an emergency hysterectomy later that year, S showed up to the hospital at 5 a.m. in short-shorts and a hoodie that read HEAVEN in block-printed text. They looked beautiful, hilarious and very much themself in the bright fluorescent lights of the surgery-wing lobby. I gave them a hard time at first, chiding them for their choice of outfit. I was worried their casual clothes would cause the medical staff to treat us with lesser care. They seemed sad, asking what the problem was.

It wasn’t until later that I uprooted my worry, noticing it had stemmed from a lifetime of sartorial self-surveillance as a fat person moving through the world, desperate to be taken seriously by authority figures with power over me. Their freedom in looking and being trans, in facing down norms and staying true to their faggy desire to wear short-shorts, was liberating for me. It helped me realize that while I will continue to make choices that keep me safe inside systems that weren’t built for me, I also have a wider array of options than I previously thought. I can choose to wear Heaven on my body and bring it down to Earth for a moment.

We’re living through skyrocketing fatphobia and the coercion of the Age of Ozempic. At the same time, governments are passing bans on healthcare for trans people, rescinding their IDs and forcing many into a state of constant movement. It’s painful to see these conditions continue to unravel around us, encouraging us to self-censor and minimize. We all make choices daily about how much of ourselves we can embody.

But it is comforting to know that S understands the particular pain of having conditional acceptance retracted. We both came of age in the 2010s, during the height of body positivity and the “transgender tipping point.” Rookie Mag feminism promised a world where it was okay to be different, try on new selves and embrace rolls, body hair and deviations from the norms of the straight and straight-sized world. Now, as adults who graduated from college straight into the pandemic and an enduring polycrisis, we have taken it upon ourselves to practise micro-experiments, crafting the world we crave and do not see around us. One where we look out for each other, take the needs of our bodies seriously, talk about our feelings. Where we get to change and explore and reinvent ourselves as many times as we need to. We are loving each other and keeping each other alive through an era of attempted eradication.

After my hysterectomy, S drove me home from the hospital with the gentleness of a wildlife rescuer transporting a wounded seagull. I held a pillow over my belly, protecting my split-open parts from the band of my seatbelt. As they manoeuvred around the potholes, we sang all the pop hits from middle school we could remember: “I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away/ I don’t know where my soul is/ I don’t know where my home is.” But S did know the way home, and soon they tucked me into bed, reading me picture books from the library about body acceptance, self-love and how to mend a broken wing.

I needed the reminders; my interactions with the hospital system regarding the surgery had been ripe with ableism and insidious fat shaming. I remember telling S one teary night that each time I went to the doctor, I felt like a student failing a test they hadn’t known to study for. S reminded me over and over that I’d done nothing wrong, nothing to deserve the threat of cancer looming in my uterus. It wasn’t a failure to be fat, gay and loud-mouthed. It was what made life sacred.

Here, too, S’s transness was a gift: they had recovered from top surgery years prior, and knew plenty about the complexities of self-image after surgery, and how to manage a pain-medicine schedule and meal train. Our community of trans and queer people visited in one long parade in the month after the operation, with jam, boba tea, quiche and sparkly stickers at their sides. In the hospital, and all through the year, I’d had pieces of myself taken from doctors whom I didn’t trust. I felt hollowed out from the inside, grief-stricken and exhausted—and yet simultaneously I felt the furthest from alone a person could feel. My partner and my community offered the access intimacy I’d always dreamed of, and that all of us deserve.

It’s been a year since surgery, and three since S and I got back into a relationship. I often find myself in awe that this partnership has unfurled into something so deep after meeting as strangers on a bus. But growth takes time and care, and we’ve tended to each other with great attention. Some nights, we curl into each other like hairs at the nape of a neck, staying still and close, wondering what the future will hold for our bodies and our communities. In holding on to each other tight, we find the answer: If we’re lucky, it will feel something just like this.