A Crow for Brunch

I was on my way to meet Lauren for brunch when I saw the crow that ruined my life. It was one of the first spring blue sky days of the year, a day that causes one to wear a sundress and a light jacket even though it’s still in the fifties and the sun is more piercing bright than it is comfortingly warm. My legs were puckered with goosebumps and my nipples poked through the thin floral fabric of my dress and I cursed my past self’s decision to skip the protection of sheer pantyhose—not that 20 denier Wolford’s would make me any warmer, but they’d make my legs look smooth at least. But I was worried Lauren, no doubt dressed in her usual baggy sweats and cropped t shirt that showed off her tight belly in an effortlessly cool way, would roll her eyes if I showed up in nylons and heels in addition to a bright floral sundress and full face of makeup, and I needed her on my side. I needed her to still like me. I needed her to not believe Michelle.

That’s why I’d set up the meeting in the first place; to make sure she heard my perspective, knew that whatever nasty rumors Michelle and her hangers-on had spread were mean exaggerations designed to cut out relevant context and make me into some kind of monster. Trans women were always doing that to one another. Stabbing one another in the back with their sharp manicures, creating a callout post and spreading baseless accusations after an interpersonal disagreement instead of talking about it like adults. It was no wonder that I’d eventually been subjected to the pincers of jealous crabs. I’d been foolish to believe I was above it, that I could be both conventionally attractive and passable and stay friends with Michelle. Not that Michelle was a brick—but let’s be honest: normal women don’t wear cat ears in public. Was it any wonder she got negative attention?

Two crows were outside of a gated underground parking garage with a block of newly constructed apartments above. They flitted from tree perch to cement perch across the sidewalk, cawing fanatically to one another. One flew against the grated gate to the underground parking, embracing the grey metal in its talons in a desperate hug, and did its best impression of a woodpecker, the sound of beak on metal reverberating deep into the garage. Birds, I thought, are stupid. The two crows spotted me and scattered into a tree on the opposite side of the street, continuing to yell. I thought little of this at first other than that it was perhaps something neutral to bring up to Lauren. A rock hit the inside of the garage door with a clattering and a caw—there was a third crow on the other side of the gate, trapped in a prison meant for cars. At the sound, her—for immediately I knew this crow was female—two ineffectual rescuers flew closer and screamed at me, blaming me for their friend’s predicament.

“Like you’re doing anything to help,” I told them, annoyance seeping into my voice.

My phone buzzed. Lauren was at the restaurant getting a table. I texted back that I was two blocks away and I’d be there soon, then walked around to find the front entrance to the building. It was locked. No doorman—a key card and app didn’t have to worry about a woman concerned about a crow. I knocked anyway. The cement was bright and unweathered and the large panes of glass reflected the crisp sky. I made sure my reflection looked good and crossed my fingers a man would answer.

I should have given up and left, but I could hear the squawks of the crow still. Her call seemed just as loud around the corner as when I’d been next to the grated garage door. I was certain I’d hear her at brunch if I didn’t save her. She needed me.

“Did you get locked out?” a man with a laptop bag and Patagonia jacket asked after cracking open the door. His jacket was the same inoffensive color as the building, and like the building it had a small pop of red that reinforced the grey nothingness. I’d forget he existed as soon as he was out of my sight, I was sure, but right now I needed him. I smiled politely and took a step back and stuck my hip out.

“Can you open the garage gate?” I asked. He smiled in confusion. “There’s a bird stuck in there,” I explained. “It would really mean a lot,” I added, batting my eyes as if we were talking about finding my lost puppy and not a wild animal I’d not known existed two minutes before.

After a brief conversation and a moment of hesitation, he told me to meet him around back. He’d established that I did not live in the new fancy midrise apartment building, and he’d shaken his head no firmly when I started to follow him inside.

“There are rules,” he said. “The lease makes me responsible for anyone I let inside.” He pointed at the cameras. That was the problem with the world. Everyone was so concerned about following rules but couldn’t agree on what the rules were. That’s why you had to stop worrying and enjoy yourself. A lesson Michelle did not appreciate.

I waited by the grated garage door and yelling crows for at least three more minutes while he took his sweet time. The birds clawed at the metal car gate and screamed at one another. I wondered if crows could lose their voices and what that would sound like. If I had come here later, would I not realize one was caged at all? Would I have just seen two silent crows staring at a parking garage and thought nothing of it? The person sized door next to the car-gate opened and the man popped out with a smile. An apology for making me wait would have been appreciated, but he didn’t even appear to recognize that.

“I’ll scare him towards you,” he said.

That wasn’t the plan. Even this stranger would not listen to me, would not follow best practices. How was I supposed to save anyone with this kind of support?

“It’s a female,” I corrected him.

He didn’t say thank you. He just shrugged and turned around. He’d make a perfect trans woman.

He needed to open the big car-sized door, like I’d told him. I didn’t say that to him though. He had already been rude, and could easily decide the bare minimum kindness he’d reluctantly indulged wasn’t worth the ordeal. And then the crow would starve to death alone in a cage because of him. So I held my tongue and pressed myself against the smaller door as flat as I could. No bird flew out.

“He flew away,” the man called out from inside the garage. “Deeper I mean. Down to the second level.” How could he have fucked up such a simple task. “I’ve got to go,” he continued, “but you can hold the door open and see if it’ll fly out. I don’t have responsibility for the garage.” He closed the inside door to the lobby and the electronic lock engaged with a whir.

My phone buzzed again like it had every so often as I’d labored to free the crow. Lauren had typed out five question marks and sent each one individually, a minute apart. That was a Michelle move. That passive aggressiveness, the way she was setting me up to be the bad one. Any response I typed would be suspect. She’d already decided I was unreliable, that I was late and couldn’t keep my word. Now anything I said about Michelle, anything I said in my defense, wouldn’t be believed.  

The last time I’d talked to Michelle had been exactly like this. I’d texted her something innocuous—probably about how I didn’t like the new salon I’d just gone to because it seemed like the only haircut they knew how to do was a sideshave—and she’d used that as a reason to attack me because apparently that’s her salon and she really likes her unflattering side shave and somehow it’s problematic of me to have a fashion sense. Every blow up with her is sudden and unexpected, but after several years of friendship, if that’s what it was, I was keen on the rumblings that proceeded. She had turned my ears into seismometers that scratched frantic warnings into my brain. The first warning is when she responds with questions in response to statements. The first time it had happened, I’d answered them patiently, even though her tone was strange—frankly it was rude and detached, with the trappings of analytics covering a core of malice. The second time she’d yelled at me in the same way, I’d learned that it didn’t matter if I answered her questions, that way it doesn’t matter if you try to stop an avalanche by shoveling snow out of the way. She had already made up her mind to be a bitch and nothing I did would prevent that. This became a pattern with her. I’d lost count of how many times she’d lost her cool with me before I finally cut her off. And then she’d posted all of those accusations online and turned everyone against me.

Almost every trans friendship is merely a matter of shared circumstances, otherwise there is no way any of us would be friends. Michelle started hormones the same month as me, and a few months later we’d met on social media during COVID. Like me, she was eager to share with someone who was so similar: our long held desires for the type of woman we had long yearned to be (tall blonde Victoria’s Secret models), the shame that had controlled us for so long (and psychoanalyzing the psychologists who seemed to get off on pathologizing our existence), the traumas we hadn’t realized we carried from growing up as women forced to pretend to be men (not the brutal kind of trauma that elicits sympathy, but the more mundane kind that regularly drives all women to insanity and is therefore used as evidence of our insane nature). Sex and kinks too, though nothing too interesting compared to cis woman and their dragon dildos. We told each other more than we told our therapists, more than we had ever told our soon to be exes. We sent photos of new outfits and traded makeup tips. We gossiped about surgeons while we recovered from their handiwork—I had my face done a month before her; she had her breasts done two months before me; and our castrations were only two days apart. It was intimately intoxicating. And like all intoxicants, it didn’t last. Eventually I sobered up.

The day after the first time she yelled at me, I lay curled in bed after crying all night. I think I would have stayed there forever, rotting into the pink cotton sheets, if not for the song sparrows outside the window. I’d moped to the window wrapped in my comforter and watched the two birds court one another. What is it like to be so desired that someone will sing to you publicly? The next day, I noticed the beginnings of a nest. Discovering birds—their identities, their songs, their habits, their personalities—became something to look forward to, something disconnected from Michelle, from our shared focus on learning how to be women—a focus that I resented for consuming so much of my time and energy and which seemed only to lead to pain. Each week, I dedicated myself to learning how to identify one more bird. At the time I still lived outside Athens, GA, the city I’d grown up in and where I’d stayed to attend the public university. I had a job that paid the bills and didn’t fire me when I came out, if not coworkers who said more than two words to me most days. Our conversations had been limited to football and fishing, neither of which I had an interest in performing to care about after coming out. But the birds said plenty. The first bird I learned, a week before Michelle called me an abusive narcissist, was the American Crow. By the time of the next fight with Michelle I knew the northern cardinal, Carolina wren, tufted titmouse, and blue jay. After that I learned the Carolina chickadee and red bellied woodpecker before the next time she told me I was a miserable bitch she felt sorry for. Then the mockingbird, eastern phoebe, eastern towhee, and indigo bunting were followed by yet another week of long text messages detailing my shortcomings and failures.

I texted Lauren that I was still on my way and stepped into the garage to find the crow. She needed me. It was dim, yellow lights spaced too far apart, their illumination dripping down grey concrete walls that matched ceiling and floor and messed with my depth perception. I heard a distant crow call echo and followed.

Michelle and I had moved to this city with the plans only naïve little girls could have: we’d be roommates, we’d push each other’s feminization to further extremes, and we’d look out for each other. Some sort of wannabe sorority sister bullshit for women about to turn 30. Unsaid: we’d also fuck each other, unleashing a tsunami of sexual desire that doing lines of coke off of a random cis dick and getting mediocrely fucked had never satiated. I always wanted to push the man away and snort another line and write long sexts to Michelle. The sex is what kept us together for so long; even now I can feel the clench of her around me, feel her tongue inside me, hear her cries of pain and ecstasy as my paddle reddened her ass. Both of our lives had continued to implode in almost every way since first meeting one another, but in a new city, with each other, I told myself, we would expand instead. We lasted a month.

I still posted to social media, a habit I had started while isolated in Athens, even though I was now in a big city full of other trans women. But four years after starting hormones I found it increasingly hard to maintain friendships with the ones I met; their jealousy was palpable, and more often than not, lead to snide remarks, to uncharitable responses, and to them excluding me from their frequent impromptu gatherings and picnics and clubbing invitations with the assumption that I was cis. The girls on social media were worse. When the federal bathroom ban was passed, I offered safety advice: the advice I would have wanted when I was first starting out, when I was bricky and clocky like them. Instead of being thanked, I was attacked by my own community. I never said other trans women must be as cis as possible, just that if they didn’t want to get harassed or attacked, if they wanted to be safe, they should look like women. Afterall, we can only control our presentation and appearance, not how a stranger will gender us. A stranger misgendering me, I’m well aware, is ultimately my fault, because I didn’t voice train enough, or practice my posture and walk, or pay a surgeon to shave off enough of the features puberty had marred me with, or if I did not breath in such a way as to minimize my rib cage. The reasons for failure, for getting clocked, are endless. It’s a mistake to ignore self-improvement and instead yell about being misgendered to an unsympathetic audience.

Michelle had been furious even though she should have been the first to agree with me. She was obsessive in her pursuit of cis beautyhood, with more frequent salon visits for filler, botox, lash lifts, and manicures than me. Instead of offering empathy, she yelled at me, becoming hysterical, and the more hysterical she became the calmer I became in response, for hysteria is the absence of reason, and since I was the more reasonable, my calmness reflected that, and illuminated my correctness. I realized that she was a child suffering from arrested development, and I was patient with her petulance. Trans women, I’ve noticed, are prone to hysteria. They should recognize that just because there is a dehumanizing debate about us, that doesn’t mean anyone wants to actually hurt us. It doesn’t mean they want to kill us, or eliminate us. These are simply distractions, culture war talking points, not worthy of serious validation. No, the biggest threat to trans existence is our own despair.

But Michelle, like all the others, didn’t want to hear that truth.

Instead of being calm and rational, these women sought out misery: they fed their addled brains horror stories about a few laws that were passed, they shared screenshots of various influencers calling for pogroms, they followed the RICO trials of the radicals in Queer Resistance and the DSA like it was a new HBO show, they gathered in groups and whispered about the most recent beating or the trans woman who disappeared when she went to provide proof of employment to her local Board of Identity. It was no way to live! It’s like, go get a manicure, buy some new heels, get another round of lip injections. Enjoy yourselves! Why do so many trans women insist on being miserable when instead they could focus on being hot and fun? Do you know who gets married rich and moved into a mansion and is never brought in for questioning? It’s not frowning girls wearing fatigues and rumbling about the news!

I took to taking long hikes by myself as former friends lost themselves to their despair, and I in turn lost my connection to that community. I had outgrown them, outgrown that shared identity. Truthfully, I felt bad for them. They were in a stage of perpetual adolescence, unable to move on, unable to grow up. If only they had maintained their rationality like me instead of focusing on the negativity of the world, instead of telling themselves they were in constant danger, instead of isolating themselves.

Each hike, I memorized a new bird. I had more than a hundred memorized now, which did nothing to help me find the crow.

The garage was half full, hulking cars scattered like reflective boulders amongst the dim overhead lights. I had walked to the back of the garage and down to the bottom level. I didn’t see a crow anywhere. Perhaps it had flown out and I hadn’t heard it. Perhaps its voice had gone hoarse.

My phone buzzed with another text from Lauren.

“I’m leaving,” Lauren said. “I wanted to give you a chance despite what Michelle told me, but she was right. You don’t care.”

I pulled up the Merlin app I used to identify the birds on my hikes and played crow calls to try to flush out the trapped crow. I pressed play over and over. The disembodied call echoed throughout the garage but was not answered. I typed a response she deserved to hear and hit send.