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Cassidy could picture River, feet bare, hair blowing wild in the breeze, hands in the dirt, sowing the seeds of the flowers they would cut for their own pleasure later as cats they’d saved sunned themself around the garden.
They touched pictures of beautiful people in an array of styles.
"I want to feel comfortable in my own skin. I don’t know exactly what that would look like. Or feel like. But I …"
Want it, need it, crave it. That was what River’s face communicated.
"I want the space to figure it out," they concluded with a nod.
The rest of the vision board was a swirl of color—flowers, plants, art, colors, animals.
"I know I’m supposed to, but I don’t have any big dream of a career. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to order people around. I just want to live and make my own decisions and be happy. God, that sounds so cheesy," they groaned.
"No way! I’m smiling over here, you just can’t see because your hair is like the blinkers they put on horses."
River snorted and glanced up through their hair, smiling at Cassidy’s smile.
"I fully endorse a life made of just living," he said. "So it’s only out of curiosity that I ask: when you were a kind was there something you wanted to be when you grew up?"
River’s smile was wry.
"I wanted to do the weather."
"On TV?"
"God, no. I thought the weather people got to go outside and stand in different parts of the region and report what the weather was. As in, 'I’m in Garnet Run and it’s about twenty degrees here. The wind is coming in from the west at whatever miles an hour.' When I found out they just read the info off a screen?" They shook their head in mock tragedy. "Dream crushed."
"I’m so sorry for your loss."
"That’s what I’m saying, though. I was born without the ambition gene. Even people who work totally normal jobs also have a TikTok with 10,000 followers who watch their passion of, like, re-caning chairs with plastic cord made from non-recyclable plastic, spun by hand on a loom they built themselves in the tradition of their Norwegian great-grandmother."
Cassidy laughed.
"You don’t much strike me as the exhibitionist type."
"I’m not. I run the shelter Instagram and I don’t even like it if my reflection is visible in a cat’s water bowl in a picture." They shuddered. "People think if you don’t have career ambition then you must have some passion project that you’re just waiting to throw your time into. And if you don’t have that, then you’re a loser. I shouldn’t care what people think, I know," River said presumptively.
"I wasn’t gonna say that," Cassidy protested. "I was going to say that lots of folks don’t really feel like they exist or matter without seeing themselves through others’ eyes. But if what you want are time and space to figure out how to feel comfortable in your own skin, to take care of animals and the land, and to relish your short time on earth, sounds like the last thing you’d want is to feel self-consciousness in front of people watching."
"Yeah," River said. "Exactly. And being nonbinary in a small town in Wyoming doesn’t exactly lend itself to the desire to be watched."
"Can I ask a question about that?" When River nodded, Cassidy asked, "What does it feel like?"
"To be nonbinary?"
"Mhm. Is that okay to ask?"
"Yeah, it’s fine to ask, just hard to answer, cuz it’s different for everyone. Um, well, okay, what does being a man feel like to you?"
Cassidy tried on and discarded multiple characteristics, but they were all external—markers of masculinity, detritus of the patriarchal culture they lived in. There was nothing that felt essential. No quality, belief, desire, or thought he could point to and say That. That right there is the seat of my maleness.
"I don’t know, actually," he said after a while, grimacing. "I just kinda … feel it?"
"Yeah, so that feeling, that knowing deep down, I don’t have it. I’ve never had it. Growing up perceived as a boy, I didn’t feel maleness. Some trans friends of mine had kind of the opposite feeling, where they just felt their gender deep inside them—just as intrinsically as you feel maleness—only it didn’t match their birth sex. But I didn’t really feel that way either. I feel like I float around in a pool of gender and sometimes I’ll float through one and sometimes through another but they’re never quite distinct or consistent. That’s kind of the best I can explain it."
Cassidy felt gears in his head click into place, effigies to a certain order that he had inherited falling away like sand.
"Thanks. It’s interesting that I can know strongly that I’m male but not be able to know why at all, and you can know strongly that you aren’t. So for both of us there is something that we can recognize as this thing, but it’s not tangible, we just … I’m not sure what I’m trying to say."
