lofty

plural yuri beach date pt 2. she's easily embarrassed.

every single time i try to sit down and write my rant about the public EV charging network, i get stuck because i want it to be a Good Blog Post, i want to cite my sources, i want to do my research. and it's fucking impossible to do so anymore. if i want to look up old tax credits for EV charger installation all i get is articles about how to apply for the credit reintroduced in 2023. it sucks. so i'm just going to write my unsourced rant with things that i've convinced myself of over the last few years of driving an EV without being able to charge at home. (if you've got corrections for me, post a comment and if i agree i'll put it up here.)

putting power in context

today i drove round trip between Seattle and Bellevue at mostly freeway speeds, averaging around 50-60 mph. my car, a kia EV6, told me i made this trip averaging 4.4 miles per kWh. if you flip that fraction around, you get 227 Wh/mi (or 141 Wh/km, which is evidently quite remarkable, particularly for highway driving; in practice on 70 mph highways it fares much closer to the EV6 numbers listed on that site).

if you ask wolfram alpha about 227 Wh it'll give you some nice real-world comparisons, like "one-fifth of the energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT", or "5.3 times the energy capacity of the iPad 3 battery". again this is to go one mile. trying to wrap my mind around the fact that i can cook three potatoes in my microwave (900 W @ 15 min) for the same amount of energy as it takes to drive a mile throws me for a loop every time.

every mile you drive, you have to recharge that, right? unless you like turning stupidly expensive cars into bricks? it takes a little less than 10 minutes to recharge 227 Wh on a standard household circuit, or two days to recharge my car from 20% to 80%, and that's if you have the ability to charge at home. which i don't, because i live in an apartment.

so i have gotten to know public chargers a bit over the last three years and oh man let me tell you

why do i need an app to charge my car again?

again, the internet doesn't work anymore, and i don't have time to do real research like digging through newspaper archives and the federal register, so this is conjecture working backwards from what i know.

It Seems To Me that a lot of public EV charging infrastructure in the US was incentivized by tax credits. people in the US love to avoid paying taxes however they can, so tax credits end up being a great incentive to get rich people and business owners to do things. they gave out tax credits for buying EVs and for installing EV chargers, and so businesses installed EV chargers.

but businesses aren't just gonna dole out electricity for free. public "level 2" chargers are the equivalent of running your dryer on max heat for as long as a car is parked there and charging. and because it's The Future, business owners don't want to write down meter readings and charge customers directly, and car drivers don't want to be social ever.

this sounds like a great opportunity for a middleman. But Wait, if an average charging session is going to be an hour or so, and cars can only charge at a few kW because they can't do road trips yet, you're really only billing like $2-$3 per session. if you charge a credit card each time, like 10% of that is going to your card processor. it'd be cheaper for us, and thus for customers [citation needed], if we could bill them $10 or $20 at a time and maintain an account for them. and thus the Charging Network was born

this started a system of every single public EV charger requiring a fucking app, so that you can authenticate your prepaid payment account with an internet-connected EVSE. it is tiring. on my phone i currently have five separate apps solely for starting and stopping a charger i've plugged my car into. there was one charging network i had to use sometimes where they evidently lost the ability to update their old app, so you had to intuit that maybe there was a different app with the same name that might work. and these apps are just universally frustrating garbage interfaces

imagine if you had to install an app for every different company you bought your gas from. you have to type in your fucking credit card number, no autofill, no mobile wallet support, and if you don't do it fast enough your session times out. and if you don't have their app and you're out of cellular range or your phone is dead you just can't get gas, there is no other option. this is an era that public EV charging is still in, although we're thankfully slowly on the way out of.

the economics here are changing a bit, because drive batteries in cars are getting much, Much larger, and DC fast chargers are getting much faster, so a 30-minute charge session can easily push past $10 or $20, and it becomes far more economical to just put a damn credit card reader on the charger. (tesla, unsurprisingly, still refuses to do so; i also don't think i've ever seen a chargepoint charger with a credit card terminal either, but it doesn't seem like they own any of their chargers.)

a brief aside on electrify america

personally i give credit to the invention of "put a credit card terminal on the charger" to Electrify America, one of the first companies that decided to try and build out a DC fast charging network along major freeways to compete with tesla superchargers. (not directly compete, because at the time only tesla's cars could use their chargers, and wouldn't usually have any reason to use EA's, but you get what i mean.) there is not much credit to give them, honestly, because they are the only network that started primarily with DC fast charging in mind, so they never had to consider the implications of credit card processing fees eating 15-20% of their bottom line.

EA does not exist because the free market decided we needed a DC fast charging network open to any vehicle spread out across the vast US highway system. it exists because one of the conditions of volkswagen's settlement with US regulators from their emissions cheating scandal was to spend $2 billion on building "clean-emissions infrastructure", including a public electric vehicle charging network.

i fundamentally do not believe that we would have any EV adoption in the US beyond tesla if it weren't for volkswagen teaching their cars to cheat on emissions tests.

why are all the chargers broken?

consider the humble gas pump. it has had the benefit of a century of engineering to put up with Some Shit. people drive off with the hose still in the car so often that it is designed to get yoinked off as safely as possible and be replaced as cheaply as possible. every single one is inspected by your state's board of weights and measures. i would guess that most of their core components are interchangeable and readily available.

gas pumps are also placed at gas stations, which are businesses with the primary goal of selling you gas, and a secondary goal of getting you to buy overpriced sodas and dubious hot dogs and letting you pee. they usually have someone physically present working there who you can tell if something is broken, so they can report it to the business owner so it gets fixed, and they really would like it to get fixed as soon as possible because if a line forms, they're going to lose business to the guy across the street.

an EV charger is an afterthought. it leases space on someone else's property. there is no proprietor you can talk to without spending 15 minutes on hold. the nice ones are placed at wal-marts or big grocery stores where you probably need a code to get into the bathroom, but sometimes you're just chilling in a hotel parking lot in the middle of nowhere for 45 minutes with nothing to do. usually, nobody working at the wal-mart or the hotel or the mall can do a damn thing if the charger is broken, and they don't care either, because that's not their business.

an EV charger is a bespoke proprietary machine, known only to its manufacturer, and probably obsolete within three years. parts, if available, take weeks to arrive and weeks to be installed by a qualified electrician. the plugs themselves are way more fragile than a gas pump nozzle. for some godforsaken reason half of them run a shitty java app on windows embedded. also they have really thick copper wiring in them, so people have recently taken to chopping off the cables for scrap, which is really easy to do because nobody is around to notice.

a lot of the big DC fast charger networks own their equipment and lease space to operate them, but networks like chargepoint seem to not own any chargers. instead businesses (or increasingly, state departments of transportation and local electric utilities) buy chargers from chargepoint, presumably because they have to be the owner to get the tax credit, and then become responsible for maintenance. there's a tax credit for installing new EV chargers, but none for maintaining them. what the fuck do you think is going to happen?

why does it take so long?

Batteries Are Fucking Terrible For Cars!!!!!

like i don't know. it is an incredible feat of engineering that my car can charge at 250 kW on a good day. it still takes like 20 minutes to get from 20% to 80%, and then it's slow as hell the rest of the way to 100%. there is only so much engineering you can do to batteries. and then they fucking wear out. i am fairly certain battery cars are not going to save us

i am still pretty bullish on hydrogen fuel cell cars — apparently i have been since i did a research paper on the topic in high school freshman english in 2007 — because it seems to me the only way you can avoid sitting at a charger for 30 minutes while still having an emissions-free vehicle. you can maybe do electrolysis on-site using the local grid or solar or whatever and the local water supply? (i guess this assumes a world where we won't have Water Wars in a decade or so)

but if we tried Everything, and i mean Everything, to decarbonize every vehicle in america and we still had to do it with battery cars, there's going to need to be a radical shift in how charging works. i think obviously we're going to have to figure out how to harmonize the fact that people who live in apartments sometimes need cars and they'll need to be able to charge them at home; four chargers for a 100-space garage isn't going to cut it. but we also need public charging infrastructure that understands that it takes thirty minutes to fill up a single car, and that there needs to be people working there to help customers and report (and maybe even fix!) problems.

one might imagine a small convenience store building with 15-20 fast chargers surrounding it to meet roughly the same capacity as a 4-pump gas station, but good god that is uh. probably 350 kW × 20 = 7 megawatts of potential grid load. realistically probably 5 MW tops. some napkin math using numbers from various press releases leads me to believe that a single walmart store might have a maximum load of half a megawatt during a heat wave, and in a lot of places in the US that's probably the largest continuous grid load in the area unless you've got major factories nearby.

there is the idea of putting batteries inside the EV chargers themselves, so that you can smooth out the grid load while still providing fast charging for cars. but now you're adding more precious metals to the system???

anyone who thinks this is the future, this is how we fix climate change, doesn't know what this shit is like and how bleak the future of battery EVs is. thanks for reading my TED talk

This isn't a carefully reasoned argument. This is a pile of vibes. This is me looking at a bunch of factors that all have the opportunity to overturn the current equilibrum being thrown into what is likely to be a very short few years.

1. There's not enough lithium. We cannot take every ICE car and replace it with an EV car. From memory, there's about enough that if we only used it for car batteries we could replace about 1/3 of cars.
2. There's not enough lithium production. We cannot take every ICE car we make this year and make an EV car instead.
3. The EU wants car manufacturers to switch to EVs by 2030. The UK just shifted that to 2035. This means they're already investing in not making ICEs in 6 years.
4. Green electricity is getting silly cheap. Outside of transportation, fossil fuel demand is going to crater.
5. Peak Oil is still sneaking up on us. Probably around 2050, but on a per-country or per-oilfield basis it's arriving unevenly all over the place. It's why they invented fracking. Fossil fuel supply is going to crater.
6. Despite this, apparently oil rigs are "going green", which is to say, now that you get less energy out of the oil you pump out of the ground than you need to put into drilling for it, some drilling platforms have their own turbines so they can keep going.
7. Your EV is twice as heavy as your ICE was. Road damage scales by the fourth power of the axle weight, so that's 16x the wear on road (and presumably tyres) before you factor in the fact that everyone apparently needs an F150 now. Sooner or later the tax incentive is going to switch hard from "don't produce CO2" to "you're paying for those road repairs, bucko".
8. Insuring your car is getting more expensive. Buying a car is getting more expensive. Repairing a car is getting more expensive.
9. The more Californian cities that burn to the ground, the more coastal cities flood or get hit by storms that flatten them, the more crops fail, the more political pressure there's going to be to stop producing more CO2. Right now "but I need my car!" and "I like my rural or beachfront home" are winning out, but one day "my car caught fire and I can't afford to replace it" or "I can't insure my home" are going to propel people towards places where they're not car-dependant.
10. You ain't getting a beater EV because the value is all in the battery.
11. Cheap, lightweight electric vehicle exist. Some east asian countries (Taiwan, I think?) have already got the infrastructure for hot-swapping scooter batteries. Electric bicycles use a lot less rare earth metals, as do electrified push-scooters. For a lot of people the math is going to start working out at ditching the car, especially in two-car households. This will likely cause a virtuous cycle with making cities better to cycle in.
12. If we do replace all those cars with EVs, we can't charge them

These factors are all pulling in different directions. Some suggest a swift shift towards EVs, some a swift shift away from oil, some that your ICE car is your best bet long term. Nevertheless: I think that it's going to look like a big shift. I think ICEs are going to become unaffordable to buy, to run, to insure. I think EVs are going to remain expensive to buy and get more expensive to run while not getting sufficiently less awkward.

The upshot, I suspect, is a lot more e-bikes, a lot more electric scooters, and a lot more extremely small form factors: Kei trucks and electric "cars" that share more lineage with the golf cart than the F150. I think a lot of people are going to have to get used to having a range of 30mph and a top speed of 20-30mph, but that'll be enough. Heck, if you've got the non-freeway routes and don't need the range it'd probably save you $10k a year per car already, so you can imagine how incentivised people might get if it saves $20k a year and all they need to do is carry the battery up to their apartment to charge.

So yeah. I reckon over the next ten years the average person is going to need to replace their car and they're going to realise that they just cannot afford it and that the alternatives are justifiable.

Oddly enough, whenever I say this people get really angry. It's reassuring to know I'm making enough sense that I cannot be dismissed as a crank.

every single time i try to sit down and write my rant about the public EV charging network, i get stuck because i want it to be a Good Blog Post, i want to cite my sources, i want to do my research. and it's fucking impossible to do so anymore. if i want to look up old tax credits for EV charger installation all i get is articles about how to apply for the credit reintroduced in 2023. it sucks. so i'm just going to write my unsourced rant with things that i've convinced myself of over the last few years of driving an EV without being able to charge at home. (if you've got corrections for me, post a comment and if i agree i'll put it up here.)

putting power in context

today i drove round trip between Seattle and Bellevue at mostly freeway speeds, averaging around 50-60 mph. my car, a kia EV6, told me i made this trip averaging 4.4 miles per kWh. if you flip that fraction around, you get 227 Wh/mi (or 141 Wh/km, which is evidently quite remarkable, particularly for highway driving; in practice on 70 mph highways it fares much closer to the EV6 numbers listed on that site).

if you ask wolfram alpha about 227 Wh it'll give you some nice real-world comparisons, like "one-fifth of the energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT", or "5.3 times the energy capacity of the iPad 3 battery". again this is to go one mile. trying to wrap my mind around the fact that i can cook three potatoes in my microwave (900 W @ 15 min) for the same amount of energy as it takes to drive a mile throws me for a loop every time.

every mile you drive, you have to recharge that, right? unless you like turning stupidly expensive cars into bricks? it takes a little less than 10 minutes to recharge 227 Wh on a standard household circuit, or two days to recharge my car from 20% to 80%, and that's if you have the ability to charge at home. which i don't, because i live in an apartment.

so i have gotten to know public chargers a bit over the last three years and oh man let me tell you

why do i need an app to charge my car again?

again, the internet doesn't work anymore, and i don't have time to do real research like digging through newspaper archives and the federal register, so this is conjecture working backwards from what i know.

It Seems To Me that a lot of public EV charging infrastructure in the US was incentivized by tax credits. people in the US love to avoid paying taxes however they can, so tax credits end up being a great incentive to get rich people and business owners to do things. they gave out tax credits for buying EVs and for installing EV chargers, and so businesses installed EV chargers.

but businesses aren't just gonna dole out electricity for free. public "level 2" chargers are the equivalent of running your dryer on max heat for as long as a car is parked there and charging. and because it's The Future, business owners don't want to write down meter readings and charge customers directly, and car drivers don't want to be social ever.

this sounds like a great opportunity for a middleman. But Wait, if an average charging session is going to be an hour or so, and cars can only charge at a few kW because they can't do road trips yet, you're really only billing like $2-$3 per session. if you charge a credit card each time, like 10% of that is going to your card processor. it'd be cheaper for us, and thus for customers [citation needed], if we could bill them $10 or $20 at a time and maintain an account for them. and thus the Charging Network was born

this started a system of every single public EV charger requiring a fucking app, so that you can authenticate your prepaid payment account with an internet-connected EVSE. it is tiring. on my phone i currently have five separate apps solely for starting and stopping a charger i've plugged my car into. there was one charging network i had to use sometimes where they evidently lost the ability to update their old app, so you had to intuit that maybe there was a different app with the same name that might work. and these apps are just universally frustrating garbage interfaces

imagine if you had to install an app for every different company you bought your gas from. you have to type in your fucking credit card number, no autofill, no mobile wallet support, and if you don't do it fast enough your session times out. and if you don't have their app and you're out of cellular range or your phone is dead you just can't get gas, there is no other option. this is an era that public EV charging is still in, although we're thankfully slowly on the way out of.

the economics here are changing a bit, because drive batteries in cars are getting much, Much larger, and DC fast chargers are getting much faster, so a 30-minute charge session can easily push past $10 or $20, and it becomes far more economical to just put a damn credit card reader on the charger. (tesla, unsurprisingly, still refuses to do so; i also don't think i've ever seen a chargepoint charger with a credit card terminal either, but it doesn't seem like they own any of their chargers.)

a brief aside on electrify america

personally i give credit to the invention of "put a credit card terminal on the charger" to Electrify America, one of the first companies that decided to try and build out a DC fast charging network along major freeways to compete with tesla superchargers. (not directly compete, because at the time only tesla's cars could use their chargers, and wouldn't usually have any reason to use EA's, but you get what i mean.) there is not much credit to give them, honestly, because they are the only network that started primarily with DC fast charging in mind, so they never had to consider the implications of credit card processing fees eating 15-20% of their bottom line.

EA does not exist because the free market decided we needed a DC fast charging network open to any vehicle spread out across the vast US highway system. it exists because one of the conditions of volkswagen's settlement with US regulators from their emissions cheating scandal was to spend $2 billion on building "clean-emissions infrastructure", including a public electric vehicle charging network.

i fundamentally do not believe that we would have any EV adoption in the US beyond tesla if it weren't for volkswagen teaching their cars to cheat on emissions tests.

why are all the chargers broken?

consider the humble gas pump. it has had the benefit of a century of engineering to put up with Some Shit. people drive off with the hose still in the car so often that it is designed to get yoinked off as safely as possible and be replaced as cheaply as possible. every single one is inspected by your state's board of weights and measures. i would guess that most of their core components are interchangeable and readily available.

gas pumps are also placed at gas stations, which are businesses with the primary goal of selling you gas, and a secondary goal of getting you to buy overpriced sodas and dubious hot dogs and letting you pee. they usually have someone physically present working there who you can tell if something is broken, so they can report it to the business owner so it gets fixed, and they really would like it to get fixed as soon as possible because if a line forms, they're going to lose business to the guy across the street.

an EV charger is an afterthought. it leases space on someone else's property. there is no proprietor you can talk to without spending 15 minutes on hold. the nice ones are placed at wal-marts or big grocery stores where you probably need a code to get into the bathroom, but sometimes you're just chilling in a hotel parking lot in the middle of nowhere for 45 minutes with nothing to do. usually, nobody working at the wal-mart or the hotel or the mall can do a damn thing if the charger is broken, and they don't care either, because that's not their business.

an EV charger is a bespoke proprietary machine, known only to its manufacturer, and probably obsolete within three years. parts, if available, take weeks to arrive and weeks to be installed by a qualified electrician. the plugs themselves are way more fragile than a gas pump nozzle. for some godforsaken reason half of them run a shitty java app on windows embedded. also they have really thick copper wiring in them, so people have recently taken to chopping off the cables for scrap, which is really easy to do because nobody is around to notice.

a lot of the big DC fast charger networks own their equipment and lease space to operate them, but networks like chargepoint seem to not own any chargers. instead businesses (or increasingly, state departments of transportation and local electric utilities) buy chargers from chargepoint, presumably because they have to be the owner to get the tax credit, and then become responsible for maintenance. there's a tax credit for installing new EV chargers, but none for maintaining them. what the fuck do you think is going to happen?

why does it take so long?

Batteries Are Fucking Terrible For Cars!!!!!

like i don't know. it is an incredible feat of engineering that my car can charge at 250 kW on a good day. it still takes like 20 minutes to get from 20% to 80%, and then it's slow as hell the rest of the way to 100%. there is only so much engineering you can do to batteries. and then they fucking wear out. i am fairly certain battery cars are not going to save us

i am still pretty bullish on hydrogen fuel cell cars — apparently i have been since i did a research paper on the topic in high school freshman english in 2007 — because it seems to me the only way you can avoid sitting at a charger for 30 minutes while still having an emissions-free vehicle. you can maybe do electrolysis on-site using the local grid or solar or whatever and the local water supply? (i guess this assumes a world where we won't have Water Wars in a decade or so)

but if we tried Everything, and i mean Everything, to decarbonize every vehicle in america and we still had to do it with battery cars, there's going to need to be a radical shift in how charging works. i think obviously we're going to have to figure out how to harmonize the fact that people who live in apartments sometimes need cars and they'll need to be able to charge them at home; four chargers for a 100-space garage isn't going to cut it. but we also need public charging infrastructure that understands that it takes thirty minutes to fill up a single car, and that there needs to be people working there to help customers and report (and maybe even fix!) problems.

one might imagine a small convenience store building with 15-20 fast chargers surrounding it to meet roughly the same capacity as a 4-pump gas station, but good god that is uh. probably 350 kW × 20 = 7 megawatts of potential grid load. realistically probably 5 MW tops. some napkin math using numbers from various press releases leads me to believe that a single walmart store might have a maximum load of half a megawatt during a heat wave, and in a lot of places in the US that's probably the largest continuous grid load in the area unless you've got major factories nearby.

there is the idea of putting batteries inside the EV chargers themselves, so that you can smooth out the grid load while still providing fast charging for cars. but now you're adding more precious metals to the system???

anyone who thinks this is the future, this is how we fix climate change, doesn't know what this shit is like and how bleak the future of battery EVs is. thanks for reading my TED talk

(CW: transcribed F slur)

I met up with a close friend today. He has not seen me since before my transition. This is not his fault, but mine; manifested as a horrible urge to hide from people who have known me longest. It feels there is more of a history to dispel. There is a subconscious desire to go back in the closet and pretend everything's okay.

I asked to meet him today, to have lunch during our breaks, like old times. He chooses a nice, cheap Japanese place and orders a Karaage Don, while I get the Teriyaki Salmon.

He confesses, off-handedly, that he's glad I asked to meet up. It's been a while.

I hide the fact that I have ulterior motives.

The thing about having a tattoo is that, well, people always want to talk about it. Sure. Whatever. I'll take the icebreakers.

"So that sleeve--" he starts.

Heh. I have focus-tested this story enough times. I have distilled it down to an essence. I have him bawling with laughter within seconds, especially because I can be as animated and silly as I want while telling the story in person.

"...It really hurt."

"I'll fucking bet!"

It is good to start out with laughter. Occasionally, I catch him looking me up and down, as if he doesn't quite believe this is the new me.

I am staring only into his eyes. I am checking for something.

It breaks my heart that I have ulterior motives.

We are in high school and we are two awkward lonely boys.

We meet by chance, talking about the manga we have been reading. He asks me for recommendations. I list off the popular ones as a defense mechanism. I am signalling that I am cool and up to date.

He tells me he likes romantic comedies.

I brighten up instantly. I tell him that I love them too (even though inwardly, I feel that I shouldn't, because isn't that stuff for girls?). And then, in shame, in utter embarrassment, I somehow find the courage to tell him that...

Well.

The type of manga I really like reading is this genre called 'Yuri'. But I'll understand if he doesn't like that kind of stuff--

He tells me instantly that he does. He says it's great unless it's under this weird category called 'Touhou' because then the storylines don't make sense.

I do not find out what 'Touhou' is until a week later.

I ask him how things are going. I tell him that I love him.

He smiles awkwardly. He shrugs it off. It is normal for both of us to do this. We are not deserving.

He says work is good, blah blah blah, and HR wants him to take time off. When he didn't, HR hounded his manager to tell him to take time off. Then HR hounded his boss to tell him to take time off.

"...Do I have to tell you to take time off?"

"Nah. I will. Maybe I'll visit Australia."

The food arrives. I am surprised at the free bowl of miso soup. We dig in.

"You're looking great," he says. "Honestly."

I know.

I cut a very nice silhouette. I dress well too. I considered a longer, more formal skirt today, but unfortunately I gave in to vanity and chose a short, flared one because I like showing off my legs.

It's nice receiving compliments.

"How did you--"

"Pilates. Three months."

"Figures."

"I've been slacking like hell recently, though."

We laugh. And then, I take my chance.

"Would you like to know more?"

We are still in high school. He invites me over to play games. His house is a mere five minutes walk after school.

Despite the invite to play, well, mostly he plays some cool single-player game he wants to show me and I watch, all enraptured. This is fine. I do not need to be in the pilot seat. I am having fun. His company pleases.

We discuss silly things. In the heat of the moment, he tells me, "Yeah, I pretend I'm a girl a lot. Like, I look at things from the perspective of a girl all the time--"

Oh, I think. I'm not alone in doing that. It's normal. It's totally normal to dream about being a girl. He does it too. All the time.

We are just two normal boys in school.

A few years later, I start dying inside.

I know this because my university photos all show a man with sad eyes hanging over a smile.

I tell him about my journey. He listens.

I tell him that I cry every day. But it gets better every day too.

I tell him that I have never felt so loved in my entire life. That it almost feels unreal the people I have met along the way.

I do not tell him about that dragon, dysphoria. I do not mention how it might be killing me.

"So, like, HRT, right?" I say. "They always say that anything up to six months is reversible--"

"A fucking free trial, you say?"

We burst out laughing.

"Yeah," I reply. "I think most people know if it's right for them after a single week."

I tell him that the mental changes come first. He asks me for examples.

I say that I've lost my capacity for anger. It's not like it existed much in the first place--I am not one to hold a grudge, ever--but I genuinely can't be angry now. I count one instance in the past five months (I am not ready to talk about it publicly yet) and even then, it lasted less than a minute.

"What do you feel then?"

"Uhhh, that horrible thing a lot of girls do. Inward self-blame. Even when it's not my fault."

He hugs me. (If it helps with the visual image, we are sitting side by side at the bar.)

"What are you doing the rest of the time?" he asks.

"Crying, I guess."

"Damn."

"You know, every transwoman I know tells me puberty shouldn't hit me this hard. Not unless there's a precedent."

"How was your first one?"

"Fucking terrible."

"Ah, yup. Same for me."

We laugh.

And we talk about sex. It's a topic I'm rather comfortable with, especially with him.

He asks me if HRT changes my sexuality.

I told him, absolutely not. All it does--I mean, this happens once you start questioning heteronormativity--is that you just become more honest with yourself.

"...There's, like, 10% of me that likes men now. I think."

He laughs. I know he's experimented with bisexuality in the past. I think he might be more of a kinkster than me.

We talk about genitals and other stuff. We talk about my entry into polyamory.

I am an open book.

"But what's really been taking up your time these days? I'm still on Genshin, are you playing anything?"

I haven't.

After a moment's silence (the teriyaki salmon don is actually pretty great), I tell him that I've been trying to learn how to live.

I do not know how.

HRT does not magically fix what's broken inside. I explain that just because I am finally 'true' to myself, it doesn't mean I know what to do next. Things feel so empty. Your prior actions, your old personality, all that feels like a mask and--

"Maddie, that's just everyone," he says.

"You feel that?"

"We're all dead inside."

I look at him. My heart breaks.

"Yeah."

I do not push.

We are in the final year of high school. His actions have changed. I watch his personality become softer, girlier, and I can tell he is exploring.

I should've been proud. Instead, inwardly, I tell myself to never do that. Men don't need to explore. Men should never embarrass themselves in that way.

The kids in our class start calling him a 'faggot'. The coolest kid tells me, specifically, not to hang out with him anymore. I regret that I almost do. I wanted to fit in so bad. My friend notices that I am distant for a few days. I end up hurting him.

That cool kid is now a misogynistic, right-wing bastard who is (unfortunately) married with a kid.

And that 'faggot' remains one of my closest friends.

We have both graduated from university.

He has become stronger, tougher. At some point, he shot up to 194 centimetres. He makes short jokes about me constantly. I remind him--ahem, ahem--I am at least, if not above, average height.

He grows a beard, a fantastic looking one too. But he dresses like a lesbian.

I rib him gently on this.

He admits it.

I think nothing on it ever again. Until now.

"What's the worst part?" he asks. "Did you ever think what would happen if you end up ugly?"

There's the rub. If this question offends, please know that he is good natured in every way. I do not need to sell you on the virtue of his character, but I would testify for him in court if it ever came down to it.

"Of course," I told him.

It's that famous tumblr meme again: gifted boy who believed he didn't deserve love unless he was smart turns into a girl who believes she doesn't deserve love unless she's pretty.

I am always surprised at how universal this is. It supercedes everything else, even the fear of transitioning. The question is always some form of: Will I be pretty? Will I pass?

"...You just have to trust it, I guess."

"Do you?"

"Fuck no. I'm terrified being almost six months in. Logically, I know there's more changes to come. Every day I think to myself what if the changes stop here--"

"What if you plateau!" he says with a laugh.

"Yeah! Look, everyone's going to tell you to trust the process. It's just hard to actually believe them."

"What do you do?"

"I lie to myself."

"Yeah?"

"I'll lie to you now, too, if you want."

"Go on."

"...I'm gonna be so hot in one year, just you wait."

He bursts out laughing. After a moment, I do too.

Haha.

...I'm dying, squirtle.

Again, I am afraid to bring up that dragon, dysphoria. I do not tell him how violently it hurts.

I do not tell him that I cannot stop crying.

His lunch break ends. I walk him back to his office.

"Jesus," he says. "What brands are you wearing? Where are you shopping from?"

"Macklemore."

The empty silence tells me this is the wrong crowd.

"I thrift," I say. I tell him that I like things from small designers because they can take more risks, so their clothes give more interesting cuts. Other than the basics, my entire wardrobe is thrifted.

"It's fun!" I tell him. "You should see my coats!"

"I bet."

We reach his office too fast, too early. I know he worries, so I tell him that I'm better now. Truly. It is a privilege to even transition in the first place.

I am staring at him in the eyes.

I do not push.

Instead, I remind him that if he ever wants to talk, I'm here.

He gives me such a tight hug when he leaves that he almost squeezes out some tears.

We part.

I do not look back. I am afraid of what I might see.