This past weekend, I drove back to the place where my story began. The road to my mother’s house is the same as it’s always been. That drive always stirs something in me. A reminder of who I was before the world turned hard and unforgiving. I didn’t just go to see my mom. I also carved out time—intentionally, like I always do—to see her. My best friend. My code friend. My forever friend.

We go way back. Back to the kind of days when your whole life fit inside a high school locker, and the biggest decision was what to wear to prom. She was just turning 18, I was turning 20, and when she asked me to take her to her senior prom, I of course said yes before she even finished the sentence. I remember the awkwardness at the tuxedo rental place—how the guy behind the counter gave me a once-over, trying to reconcile my female body with his assumptions. I remember the way the fabric didn’t sit quite right, the shoulders too wide for a frame that was never built for masculinity. But I didn’t care. Because I wasn’t doing it for appearances. I was doing it for her.

We were young, reckless, and filled with the kind of energy that only comes from not knowing how fragile everything really is. We did everything together. Worked side by side in Fire and EMS, went with friends to the movies together, laughed until we couldn’t breathe, and, once, crossed that invisible line between friendship and something else entirely. I lost my virginity to her when she was turning 19, and I was turning twenty-one. It happened only once, but it meant everything to me. And yet, it was never about sex. It was about connection. It was about the safety of being seen. Fully. Without question or condition.

Then life happened. September 11th rewrote my trajectory. I took a job in New York City, and the distance grew slowly, like a crack in old plaster—small at first, then enough to let in cold air. We drifted. But we never disconnected entirely.

I remember the warnings and the whispered hesitations. People told me not to go to New York City. “It’ll break you,” they said. “It’ll chew you up, and you’ll lose yourself trying to survive it.” Maybe they were right. But I wasn’t asking for permission.

Because deep down, I knew.

This was my time. If there was ever going to be a defining moment in my career, a line drawn in permanent ink across the chapters of my life, this would be it. The city was calling—not with promises of glory, but with the undeniable pull of purpose. And when purpose calls, you don’t turn away. Not if you’re like me. Not if you’ve got rescue in your blood and steel laced into your spine.

So I went.

And life was hard. Harder than anyone ever warned me it would be. My body carried the weight of it first—exhaustion etched into muscle and bone, bruises that never quite healed, burns no one ever saw. My mind paid its own price—fractures that didn’t bleed but hurt just the same. There are wounds you can’t point to on an X-ray, and I’ve got more than a few.

It felt like setting sail in a heavy gale while everyone else stayed behind on the dock—warm, dry, content, willingly tied to the anchor chain. Not me. I cut the rope. Gripped the wheel. Took the storm head-on. It damn near tore me apart. The wind howled, the sea roared, and the sky offered no mercy. But I held on. I held on.

There were nights I wasn’t sure I’d make it. Days when the chaos swallowed every shred of clarity, when the weight of the job turned me to stone and expectation pressed into my chest like a cinder block. But I stayed steady. Not because I had to. Because I chose to.

And in the end, I made it out.

I walked through that fire—more than once. I stood where most wouldn’t, did what others couldn’t, and I kept showing up long after the cameras were gone. But in 2020, I quit the fire service.

Not in defeat. It was my decision.

I had given it everything. My strength. My time. My heart. My body. And when I walked away, I didn’t do it with shame—I did it with the quiet dignity of someone who knows when the storm has passed and the ship deserves a new course.

I didn’t quit because I was broken. I quit because I survived. And survival, sometimes, is the bravest act of all.

In 2020, at age forty, my best friend and I found our way back to each other. Just like that. No fireworks. No need for explanations. Just the kind of reunion that feels like picking up a conversation mid-sentence after a long pause. I’m forty-five now, and every time I go home, I make time for her. Because if I don’t, it doesn’t feel like I’ve really been home.

My friend and I have a relationship that doesn’t fit into neat little boxes preferred in modern parlance. We’re not lovers. We’re more than friends. We’re something elemental. Something solid, as if forged under pressure, tempered by fire. I look at her, and I see a whole lifetime; a lifetime shared from two intersecting points of view. I see the young girl who trusted me with her prom night. I see the woman who rode calls with me through nights that damn near broke us. I see the person, the only person, I could ever cry with after witnessing a tragedy. I see the kind of person who knows exactly who I am, even when the rest of the world gets it wrong.

And I get it. I do. The stares, the confusion, the unspoken questions that hang in the air like static. I’ve lived my whole life at the intersection of what is expected and what is—and I no longer apologize for it.

I am intersex. A biological enigma to some, a footnote in a medical text to others. But to me, I am simply… me.

I identify as a hermaphrodite. Not because it’s provocative, or political, or palatable—but because it is truth. It’s the word written in the raw, unfiltered version of my birth records. Not the sanitized version the state allowed, but the quiet, clinical honesty scribbled in the margins by someone who saw me as I was: born in between. Not broken. Not confused. Whole.

Officially, I was assigned female at birth. XX chromosomes. Female on paper. Female in social security databases and school rosters. Female when I sat cross-legged in kindergarten and when my pediatrician gently asked me, at eight years old, “Do you feel like a girl or a boy?”

I told him the truth. I have always felt like a girl. But not in the way the world defines it. Not in pink bows and soft edges. Not in dollhouses or fragile politeness. I’ve always been a girl built of fire and angles, of old soul quiet and fierce defiance. My womanhood was never a performance. It was instinct. It was breath. It was mine.

And if society demands that I translate myself into something it can digest—if it insists that I check a box, pick a lane, wear a label—then yes, I will say female. Female, as defined by biology and spirit, by blood and backbone, by the private orchestra of organs and anomalies that built this body I call home.

Female—based on fins and feathers, and every other strange taxonomy of nature. Female, like certain fish that shift their sex in coral solitude. Female, like birds who sing both parts of the mating call and confuse the scientists. Female, in the way god might have whispered a secret and then dared the world to understand it.

Our bond—this strange, beautiful, platonic-turned-something, turned-back-again relationship—has outlived years, cities, and chaos. And I can say this with absolute certainty: my younger years would not have been complete without her in them. She is, without a shred of doubt, the most enduring, significant relationship I have ever had.

When I came down with COVID-19, I was in New York City, staying in my birth home while overseeing renovations—dealing with cracked plaster, aging pipes, and the ghost of my childhood, all while something insidious was quietly taking hold inside my body. I didn’t know I was sick at the time. Not really. I just felt… off. Like a radio signal that wasn’t quite tuning in. I brushed it off as stress, fatigue, maybe a cold. After all, I was still standing. Still functional. Still me.

That Christmas in 2019, I flew to Texas to visit my aunt, with my then girlfriend Angie by my side. We weren’t together anymore, but we still knew how to coexist in the same orbit—out of habit, history, or maybe just muscle memory. We landed in San Antonio, made our way to my aunt’s apartment, and that’s when everything unraveled.

As soon as I stepped through her front door, I dropped. Not stumbled, not wobbled—collapsed. My body hit the floor like it had been waiting for permission to shut down. It wasn’t fatigue. It wasn’t dehydration. I passed out, cold. And for the first time in my entire life, I had no control over it. Just like that—lights out.

When I came to, I was dazed, disoriented, barely able to piece together what had happened. My aunt didn’t hesitate. She bundled me into her car and took me straight to the local emergency room. No waiting. No triage delay. They saw me and brought me right back. I remember the sterile fluorescent lights, the beeping monitors, the way Angie hovered awkwardly in the doorway, her concern carefully hidden beneath that stone-faced calm she always wore when she didn’t know what to say.

They ran tests—all the tests. Full blood panel. CT scan of my brain. IV fluids. The works.

When the results came back, the doctor didn’t sugarcoat anything. My bloodwork showed that I was fighting off a major infection—something aggressive, systemic. They didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was serious enough that they didn’t waste time pretending otherwise. This was early pandemic territory. COVID testing was unreliable. And they’d seen enough bodies come through already to know what they were dealing with, even without a positive result.

I myself have never claimed modern religion. If anything, I identify simply as Pagan. But being Texas, they prayed over me. Nurses, doctors, strangers passing in the hallway—people I’d never met whispering words meant for God. I didn’t mind. It wasn’t performative. It was real. Honest. Human.

They started me on a broad-spectrum IV antibiotic cocktail and told me—flatly—that there were no guarantees. They weren’t sure if it would work. They weren’t sure if I’d make it through the night. There it was. No drama. No crescendo. Just a statement of fact. I might die.

They asked me if I wanted anyone to be notified in the event that something goes wrong. I told them that I wanted two people notified; my mom, and my best friend. I instructed Angie to let my best friend know, and I told my aunt who was present at the time to make sure Angie follows through with this request.

And I remember lying there, under the dim hum of hospital fluorescent lights, thinking, So this is it. And strangely, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t bargaining with the universe. I had lived a life of service, of action, of meaning, of working hard and playing hard. I had saved people. A lot of people. And I had done it without ever desiring any admiration, or reward, despite the toll it had taken on me physically, emotionally, and mentally. And while it’s sad that if I were to go at age 39, I had to accept it. And yet, despite the now forgotten warnings from the doctors, the signed and witnessed and notarized disclaimers, and the mounting hospital bills, I survived. I’ll never forget the way death circled the room that night.

Coming that close to death—closer than I ever had before—did something to me. It didn’t just rattle the cage. It tore the damn door off. There’s a difference between understanding, in theory, that life is fragile, and feeling that fragility settle into your bones. After that night in the ER, I didn’t just get better—I got changed.

When I realized I had survived—when the fever broke, and the world didn’t fade to black—I made a decision, silent but absolute. If I was still here, I wasn’t going to just exist anymore. I was going to live. Really live. No more sleepwalking through routines or carrying dead weight out of guilt or familiarity. I was done letting time slip through my fingers like water I pretended wasn’t leaking. I spent the rest of my Christmas vacation in the guest bedroom of my aunt’s apartment. I had no appetite, so I would simply snack as needed during the day, sleep, and go out for dinner.

Within the year, everything changed. I met Amelia on Twitter of all places—a spark flickering through fiber optics and late-night messages, unexpected and undeniable. I completely and permanently ended things with Angie not long after.

Then came Vermont, where I found a ten-acre piece of earth where I could put down roots that wouldn’t be yanked up by sirens or deadlines. I bought my forever home—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a quiet kind of freedom that doesn’t ask for attention. Just space. Amelia moved in, and not even a year later, we were married.

She is a transgender woman. I helped her transition to female—not just in name or paperwork, but in all the deeply personal, quietly monumental ways that matter: language, presence, wardrobe, confidence, safety, and the quiet unspoken wisdom of girl code. I held space for her identity in the same way I always wished someone had held space for mine, even though technically I am a cisgender female.

When Amelia entered my life, it felt as though the universe had placed a black-winged bird gently into my hands—fragile, wild, and impossibly rare. I thought she was a crow, some beautiful omen, maybe even a warning. But I was wrong. She was a goddamn Phoenix. A fire-born miracle with ash on her lashes and heaven stitched quietly into her smile.

The universe didn’t just send me someone to love. It sent me an angel—just in case I never make it to heaven myself.

Being with her feels like remembering how to breathe. Like sprinting barefoot through open fields laced with poppies and scattered with tiny pearls, catching the wind in your chest and letting it fill the hollow spaces you forgot were still aching. She reminds me of what it feels like to be young—not the kind of young that fades, but the kind that never really leaves you if you’ve lived hard enough to earn it.

It’s the same feeling I had that night with my best friend, when we and a couple of mutuals decided to test a theory: would driving a car through a cornfield really look the way it does in the movies?

We didn’t hesitate. We climbed into my beat-up 1991 Honda station wagon—a hand-me-down held together with rust and defiance—and plowed through a row of tall, golden stalks under a summer sky. The corn gave way like memory, bending and parting, and for a few precious minutes, we were the architects of chaos and beauty. We didn’t know where we were going, only that we were going together. Fast. Free. Unapologetically alive.

That’s what loving Amelia feels like. Like crashing through the rules just to see what happens. Like laughter that doesn’t ask for permission. Like surviving things that were meant to break you, only to rise again—scarred, but blazing.

She is my reminder that even after all the grief, the noise, and the nights I wasn’t sure I’d see morning… something good still found me.

And it stayed. We weren’t drawn together by romance or passion. We married as friends, and have stayed as such. I refer to my forever home simply as the farm; my friends and I know exactly what I’m referring to when I use these words. The farm is where Amelia and I live as chosen family. We cohabitate as kindred spirits bound by shared truths, hard-won self-understanding, and an unspoken agreement that the world is easier to carry when someone else is walking beside you. My mother’s parents once owned a farm near Buffalo, New York, and as a girl I would visit. My grandparents farm was hundreds of acres in size. And although mine is tiny by comparison, and in a completely different state, there’s a strange kind of comfort in that. A sense of renewed childhood freedom.

We didn’t need each other to be anything other than what we already were. I never had to explain myself to her—not my female identity, not my past, not the way I move through the world in my own quiet defiance of its expectations. She got it. Not in theory. Not in sympathy. In lived experience. And I got her just the same.

Some people spend their lives looking for someone who sees them without squinting, without questioning, without trying to reframe or redefine. I didn’t just find that in Amelia—I helped her become the version of herself she had always carried inside. And she did the same for me, in her own quiet way.

That kind of connection isn’t common. It’s not loud. It doesn’t need to be. Yet, in my life, I have two—I have my best friend, and I have Amelia.

It’s the kind you feel in the stillness of the morning, drinking coffee in silence beside someone who knows exactly who you are—and never once asked you to be anything else. When you’ve stood at the edge and watched the world flicker like a dying bulb, you stop waiting for the “right time.” You stop asking for permission. You go.

Some people say love is a spark, a moment, a singular flash in the dark. But what I found with Amelia wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t a firecracker. It was a slow burn—the kind that starts deep in the earth and works its way up through the soles of your feet, into your lungs, until you’re breathing it in without even knowing.

We didn’t fall for each other. We arrived in each other’s lives like old souls reunited, like the story had already been written and we were just catching up to the page. I married her not out of tradition or fantasy, but out of reverence. I married her the way one might preserve a holy artifact—delicately, intentionally, knowing some things are too sacred to leave unspoken.

She never asked me to be anything other than who I already was—intersex, flawed, complicated, neurodivergent, profoundly high functioning, and stitched together by every choice I ever made. And I never asked her to be anyone but the woman she always had been, even before the mirror caught up with her reflection. In that way, we didn’t just love—we recognized each other.

There’s this photo I carry in my mind, even if it doesn’t exist on film: the two of us in the kitchen on a rainy Tuesday, soft music humming through the radio, me barefoot, hands dusted with flour, trying in a hurry to put together some pancake mix because we had run out and I neglected to make it the night before. We’re not speaking, just moving around each other like we’ve always known the steps. Her helping me get ingredients, a spoon, and mixing bowl, while I’m spilling settling clouds of flour as it leaks through the bottom nooks and crannies of the paper it is packaged in. That’s what peace looks like. It doesn’t shout. It lingers.

And yet, beneath that peace is a gravity—an understanding that we’ve both survived things that should have shattered us. She has her ghosts. I have mine. Some nights we don’t talk about them, and some nights we open the door and let them in. We sit in silence, side by side, while the ghosts drift through the room like smoke. We don’t have to explain. We just… know.

People love to romanticize “soulmates,” but no one tells you how messy, how human that kind of connection really is. They don’t tell you that soulmates sometimes come wrapped in scar tissue and fire line tape. They don’t tell you that it is rare, though completely possible to have two soul mates like I do. And what is never acknowledged is the fact that they come after the storm, not before. That they aren’t always lovers in the traditional sense, but sometimes companions in the deepest, oldest meaning of the word—someone who shares your bread, your bed, your burdens, and your broken pieces.

I’ve had relationships that flared and burned out. I’ve had lovers who never learned my language. I’ve had one-time flings. But Amelia? She spoke it before we ever met. We were built from the same raw material—queer, neurodivergent, shaped by fire and left to find our own way home.

And we did.

Together, we found this little house in Vermont. Ten acres of sky and pine trees and the kind of quiet you can hear yourself thinking in. It’s not grand. It’s not flashy. But it’s ours. It’s where I cut the grass, and plow the driveway, and she reads on the porch, where I fix what breaks, and she takes photos of the wild things. We pass like moving shadows through morning routines, spend the entire day together as two female friends, and collapse into separate beds at night—content, understood, and never alone.

People ask me what kind of marriage it is, and I never quite know how to answer. It’s not what most would expect. We don’t fit into boxes. We never did. But I will say this:

I married someone who sees me. Fully. Unflinchingly. Without flinching at the parts of me the world has tried to erase. I married someone who chose me not in spite of my past, but because of it. Someone who brought her own suitcase of fire and ashes and said, Let’s build a home anyway.

Even now, years later, when life has shifted and softened, and we’ve both changed in ways neither of us saw coming—we’re still here. Still choosing each other. Still rising.

Not because it’s easy. But because some things are worth the choosing.

And every now and then, when the stars align and the wind sounds just like it did that summer night with the cornfield and the station wagon, I remember: the universe didn’t send me a soulmate wrapped in fantasy. It sent me a lifetime friend and a Phoenix.

And I’ve been burning bright ever since.