The clock is ticking, but it will still take an hour for the plane to arrive. He scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, hoping it will help burn the wick of time even a little bit faster. But not much is worth reading or remembering: the strongest emotions he feels are slight giggles at memes of the current new game, mild anger at bad takes, or simple awe at a work of art. The scrolling continues.

But wait! Young boy, this next post might catch your eye! A simple meme in pink and blue, expressing a simple affirmation for trans girls. Something stirs. This is nothing new for him, he has been reading these memes for months at this point. Yet somehow, despite this familiarity, this random meme has found its mark and pierced his heart. The stirring grows. For months while reading these memes and researching transness he had undergone a probabilistic analysis of himself. His mind has been a flurry of gender confusion for a long time now, though the probability never rose beyond 50%. He had wanted to become a femboy for years, yet never dared try. So why had he been feeling this way these past months? Dread starts to set in. He thinks it may be over 50% now. A silent panic arrests him. The vision of his future self collapses. What will he do now if this probability is true? He can't tell anyone, not his mother who ridiculed him anytime he showed vulnerability, nor his friends online who will be unable to reach him in just a short while when he is on the plane. He is stuck, simply waiting, as a myriad of wordless feelings race to dominate his mind.

He boards the flight. 8 hours go by, and he is completely numb through it all. His mother is next to him, but he is completely isolated in his thoughts, in his wordless fears. The hours pass as a slow dismantling of his identity occurs, parts cannibalised by the newborn which has yet to fully emerge. Anxious and lonely, unseen by all, the stirring reaches its crescendo.

She reaches her new home. The numbness is still there, but at least she can try to rest now that she is somewhere safe. She enters the bathroom to find a dirty tub covered in so much hair one might think it was growing out of some pores hidden by the grime, like a mockery of the dark fur covering her body which she so loathed. She is still too numb to care. She runs the water and sits in the muck as it fills the bath at her feet. trying to wash away the fear of the day. It doesn't work. The muck rises further, high enough now to hide the pieces of him adorning her body. She shuts off the water and lays back. She tries to avoid thinking about it. But she can't deny that the body which he thought was okay now feels like a prison. She realises that maybe it always did, and he was just a mask to hide it. With the porcelain of the mask peeled back a little, the pulsating flesh beneath is vivid and clear, deformed and wretched in every respect. She washes herself quickly, wishing she could feel ignore this again. She never will.

Eventually she gets in bed and, alone in her room, messages one of her friends. Honestly friend is too strong a word, this person is more of an acquaintance. A trans woman who months previous insisted that the boy was in denial of his transness. At the time this insistence simply felt as barbs that pushed him further into denial. The irony was not lost on the girl now. Though nonetheless the woman gloated as though it were. Their conversation continued, the woman offered advice on surgery and DIY HRT, but for the girl stuck dependent upon her family, these were wholly useless. How could she even attempt to afford DIY without a job? How could she get a surgery anytime soon? Why was this woman so insistent on these as the correct and only way to be?

The conversation lulled and so the girl went to look for any other options near her. Surely there is something, anything that she can do. Surely it isn't hopeless yet. An article flashed by. There is a local clinic which offered informed consent HRT! Yet she felt the pang of excitement turn to anguish as she kept reading. It was set to be shut down in just a few days, far too soon for her to do anything. Her face felt wet. The tears she held back would wait no longer.

Months earlier, she tried to pull the vicious mask off before it could mar her body any further. Against her better judgement, she chose a day to tell her mother. A poorer choice could not have been made. On that day, the boy she was introduced the girl she is to her mother. For the next three nights her mother wept incessantly. The girl, feeling a putrid shame and remorse well up inside, comforted her mother throughout it. They both had no one else, after all. Yet no matter how hard she tried, the girl could not change her mother's view. She would forever be a murderer, the one who killed the boy and now possessed his body like a malignant devil. She would be a disgusting mockery of womanhood, ugly and insulting in every respect. She would be the one who became a monster within the family that would tear its last vestiges apart. And through it all her mother was sure to let the girl know of one thing: if she ever transitioned, her mother would kill herself.

During these nights, her mother insisted upon telling the rest of the family. The others all said they would support her. Her brother was foremost among them, and actively argued with their mother to defend the girl, though it helped little. Her sister spoke with the girl in private, to help comfort her. Finally, her father said that they would, upon his return, help the girl get a therapist. These statements of support simply incensed her mother's fury further. She would degrade the girl at every turn, until eventually her daughter put back on the mask shaped like her son. Encasing herself in the porcelain prison willingly to avoid the fire of her mother as much as possible.

But the girl would keep trying in private: She would train her voice so others might hear her instead of the boy, she began to rid herself of the fur that marred her skin, and she would practice styling her hair in private, adorning her prison in ways that hid the mask with herself. Any time her mother caught wind, however, she would lash out. Once, upon catching the girl taking a photo in a mirror, she demanded to know if the evil child was selling her son's body to some pimp. Once, after demanding to know if she was still possessing her son, the mother burned the girl's books.

Through it all, the girl focused on the hope that, once father arrived, she could at least get the therapy that she needed so she might get HRT to fix her continually degrading body. But when he arrived, he never once mentioned the therapy, never once even used the nickname he promised to use. The girl was hurt, but too afraid to mention it herself. She set herself then on possibility that lay on the horizon: her sister's visit in August. She waited and waited for the day, until it finally arrived.

The memories were fresh in her head, but she tried to pay them little mind. She continued to lay on her bed until she heard a car outside. Her sister arrived. The two spoke, quickly connecting again. After a few minutes, they went to the girl's room. There, she pulled the mask of the porcelain boy back a little to ask her sister if she might help the girl speak with father. Her sister refused, insisting that their father would have no problem if the girl asked him herself. But the girl was afraid, she could not do it alone. So she let it go and never tried.

That night, feeling alone and hopeless, she turned on her phone to try and distract herself. She opened sites filled with those like her mother and read what they would say, trying to numb everything. It wasn't enough. She read a post referencing a suicide statistic, then thought of going to the nearby bridge and jumping. Everything was hopeless, after all. No one would ever see the girl as herself, they would either insist upon the cracked mask as the true self or leave the girl to rot on her own. Nothingness seemed a lot better than that. This was nowhere near the first or last time the girl would have such thoughts. But, for a change, the thoughts elicited a new emotion: Anger. She refused to have her entire gods damned life be summed up as a dot in a statistic that would be used to hurt others like herself. She refused to let her mother keep her locked in a porcelain prison. She resolved herself then and there: she would save herself if no one else would. She would break the last vestiges of the mask of the boy.

This feeling, however, has little long-term effect in improving her mood. Time has seemingly stood still for the past year, nearly everything remained the same. But it hasn't; the girl was at university discovering her love of learning and teaching. And now, she had a job. While she continued to hide behind the mask, the first steps towards her reaching HRT were falling in place. Months earlier, she had concocted a plan to receive it: Money was the first priority, then she would seek a psychologist for a diagnosis, then finally she would be able to receive it secretly while still living with her parents until university finished. Yet try as she might, she could not find a psych, and the time limit she imposed upon herself was fast approaching. The lack of progress felt like failure as she watched the candle of time burning near its base. She could feel her body decay more and more into the prison with each passing day, even if she could not see it. Through it all she still worried about how she would look in the future. But she could push past the pain, at least for now. Because the little progress she had made was enough to help her drag on. After all, time hadn't run out yet.

But that degradation would stick with her, too. A few months prior, she began to need to shave on a daily basis to keep the appearance of a clean shave. This final symbol of her prison held her down, a stake rammed into her hand that would bolt her to it. It horrified her as she watched the prickling hair crawl out of the seams of her face to cover it all. Every morning routine now served as a reminder of her failure to go quick enough. A sting akin to a cut that would never go away.

The girl got up. Worrying about this would do her little good. She walked over to pick something to eat, yet as she did so she caught a glimpse of someone in the mirror. The immediate trait that jumped out was the person's long hair. So she thought, briefly, that the girl in the mirror was pretty.

She didn't realise until she returned to her room that the girl was herself.

The family the girl was once so beholden to is no longer holding her down. Months prior, they had learned of her plans and began to abuse her yet again. Now both mother and father insisted upon her inevitable ugliness, the mistake that she was making, and how she would be gone to them. Matters were not helped by the cousin who visited and was treated as the ideal child by her own mother. She lost count of the days she would cry herself to sleep or the times that she would need to chant some phrase to avoid thinking about her mother's threats of suicide.

One night, while she was still awake, her mother came to her, and began to yell how she needed to get out of the house, how she wants her to be homeless because she is not her son but simply some devil possessing him. The girl didn't budge, but the worries began to creep that night.

The next day, her father told her directly to prepare to move out. The girl had an indeterminate amount of time to get a new home and job to pay for it lined up. Alone. She quickly found a cheap apartment, and as soon as she had the tour lined up her father declared that that day, the day of the tour, would be the day she would have to leave. She did not even have confirmation she'd get the apartment in question, nor a job at the time. The girl packed her bags over the next few days between bouts of crying and a difficulty breathing which she had never felt prior.

While this was occurring, she also finally received her HRT. The first pill felt like a tingle as it slowly dissolved, and immediately she felt the fog that always obscured her mind clear, but with it the emotions came crashing down harder than ever before.

Over the next days, as she left her home, she was in a dazed, zombie-like state, simply going through the motions to set herself up. She had the luck of having friends offer their places, but the transition to her adulthood was rough nonetheless. Through the next months she would move 3 more times to different places, and gradually have to become more and more independent before eventually, she could no longer consider herself a girl.

But through it all, she reached a happiness she never felt before. The woman who took the place of that scared girl is content with where she is; she is pretty, independent, and can finally be who she is. No pain in her past can change that.