Encrypted-2

I wake up like I always do 5:28 AM it’s a reflex. I have a routine and that’s not possible right now. I’m not home, not in my home, my sanctuary, the one place that…that was supposed to be my refuge against the chaos out there of the world.

It was all gone, but I found something else, someone wonderful and I think I discovered something…It wasn’t enough though. Just my morning routine kept trying to run through my head, and not being there home it just…it kept ticking away until I close my eyes trying to get it out of my head.

Impossible because I’m just not built like that.

What it does do is I start flashbacking to getting jumped, getting that greasy feeling bag over my head, I tried to get it off but I just couldn’t and I...I could feel the unsolidness of the plastic like it was…greasy.

Then the beatings, and my home my home my safe place I keep seeing everything that was ruined over and over. It was the only place that was mine, that fit my strangeness and it had taken so long for me to get it where it would fit me, it had to fit me just right it had to or I couldn’t live there just...it’s all gone now. They ruined it…!

I heard this wretched strangled sound come out of me that is just as painful as it is pathetic and I’m shaking and I’m crying like some wounded animal, I can’t even cry right like a “normal person.”

It’s these arms around me that hold me tighter than tight that save me. I freak out at first, scream, shake, thrash because sometimes I had this thing about being touched and I’ve had to get the idea of physical contact with others established in my head in order for it not to be a bad thing for me.

Regular school was hell for me; my parents had enough issues with me that personal contact with them wasn’t something that I received. So how could I be ready for something that invasive when I didn’t know it was coming? Then there was those who thought that I was a freak and different and they’d bully me, pick on me physically because more often than not I didn’t get the nuances of why they were teasing me or I could pretend that I didn’t.

That mattered very little to the bullies that decided that I needed to be corrected in how I acted around them. It was the middle years of school that was the worst. There were some kids that just weren’t comfortable around me. I was strange, off- putting I talked in a funny way. Not like a deaf person might or a learning disabled person might but like someone who just doesn’t get it. They were hostile to me all through middle school. There were kids who just liked to hit and hurt me.

There are people out there that just react to people like me with violence and contempt. Or even worse, pity. There were just some people that thought they could fix me. Or that I need to be taken care of like I was mentally disabled and then there were those that thought the religion might fix me. One of the guidance councilors in grade eight had actually had me in his office for three months during my free period’s everyday so he could get me to pray away my sins. He became a problem for me when he thought I wasn’t devout enough. But if you pray and mean it aren’t you supposed to be forgiven of your sins? If my sin had made me like this and praying to be forgiven for my sins…I didn’t get the theory behind the things he was trying to tell me.

He didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t make sense out of the supposed rules of the bible and his religion. Or that I believed more in real science that what he was trying to shove down my throat.

He took me to his own house one day and he was going to exorcise the sin out of me. I remember that he hit me. I remember he had hit me like three times before my father had arrived and beat him up.

It was one of the few times he had ever defended me, even if he was distant afterwards.

But yes the ones who pitied me were the worst. Those I encountered more and more as I got older in high school and when it was uncool to beat on me or to tease me. There were still some that did but rarely. But it was the ones that pitied me for being me and no real reason than that and they thought that I deserved their pity that really drove me away from even trying to be social.

Even as socially awkward as I was there were just days that those looks just sort of choked something off in me. Hurt me in a deeper way. Those days I think I’d have preferred to have taken a beating.

I cloistered myself away in the computer lab or the library as much as I could. Even in the town I came from there wasn’t much refuge for somebody like me. Even the town library had become more often than not my sanctuary. Learning and exploring and fiction and science fiction my escapes if I could understand them and get the things the writer was try to get across.

Those arms though…

Saving me, those are don’t let me go even as I panic and then my thrashing turns into them rocking me and holding me and there’s this light yet sultry very soothing voice going. “Shush, Shush Madison, I’ve got you, its okay you’re safe here.”

“Shush…you’re safe Maddie, you’re safe.” It slowly starts to sink in where I’m at, that I’m at Brandy’s home and it’s this amazing person. The most amazing person I’ve ever met holding me tightly and rocking me so perfectly. I manage to lift my head to look at her and there’s love that even someone like me can unmistakingly see there. And it opens up one of those locked up emotional places in me and I start to cry on her shoulder.
I don’t know how long I’m crying for on Brandy’s shoulder for, that’s slightly distressing.

She looks at me, she is so beautiful. I’m still very much amazed that I am here and I found her although technically she is the one who found and rescued me. I love the tousled mess of her hair and the exotic rich coffee of her skin. I love the kindness and sweetness I’m finding just staring into her face.

“Better?”

“No, not really?”

“But you’re not crying?”

“No but I am really confused?”

“About being transgendered?”

“No?” I am confused and I’m confusing her. “No I am sure of that being the state that I am supposed to be. It isn’t that. It’s the fact that I have no idea what to do and there is this routine that I used to go through every day to get ready to go to my classes and to do my research and just to be ready to go through the day but with everything that has happened and where I am at I can’t do that now.”

“Oh is that important?”

I nod, even talking about it brings it to mind and my voice is leaving me, going away to that place where I can’t talk. I can’t look at her because I feel so bad, so adrift.

She slides away from me and comes back with a not so good laptop computer. It’s old and heavy compared to the one that I used to own but then again she’s doing the best that she can with what she has available.

“Here sweetie you can e-mail the school and tell them that you might be out for awhile and that you were assaulted and broken into and need time to recover and to figure things out.”

It’s instantly good news. I smile at her and actually am able to look her in the face and she’s got this look there that gets right passed my awkwardness and inability to connect. No one has ever looked at me like that. “Thank you so much Brandy.” I can actually hear happy…happy in my own voice.

We kiss and she takes me to that space in my head that’s very okay. Then Brandy is smiling at me. “I’m going to go get beautiful, you go ahead and do what you need to do.”

“Wait.”

“Wait?”

“Please, I won’t be long. I want to learn how to be beautiful too.”

Brandy smiles at me. “Sure, how about I go make breakfast?”

“Breakfast would be nice.”

“What would you like to have?”

“Scrambled eggs, white bread toast nothing on it, tea with just some milk in it…please?”

“No problem Madison.”

I can’t help but smile at that. Madison Grant…not Mathew, it just sounds so right. Like that feeling you get when you’re doing calculations and it just turns out right, even before you finish writing down the answer…finally knowing what I am, it’s like that. My solution.

I get online and I write the university, and to the doctors at the heads of each of my departments and I write my therapist who has been helping me deal with everything from deciphering society to working with the latest theories and developments in my development. I tell her about my attack and my situation and me realization about being transgendered. After that I report my credit cards stolen and my identification too and order my new ones for each.

Oh that feels better. Getting things back in order and back under control if only this little bit is so soothing to me. I get up and strip the bed and moving in the panties I’m wearing is very comforting in the snugness and I’m staring at the piles of things when Brandy comes back into the bedroom.

“Madison?”

“Yes?”

“What happened?”

“I need to change the bed.”

“Need to?”

“Yes?” I look at her and hug myself, nervous…trying not to count on my fingers. “Brandy, I’m not good at things that everyone can do…I’m strange and I have something wrong with…”

She cuts me off with a kiss and hugs me. “Madison, what you are is more wonderful and special than you’ll ever know.” There’s another tender kiss and her body pressing into mine. “If we need to change the sheets everyday then we do, no big deal.”

“It’s not?”

“No hon. I’ve got my own washer and dryer here so it’s okay. Anything else?”

“Oh Brandy, there’s so much.” I look down at the floor. She presses her face against mine cheek to cheek.

“Maddie? You want to know something?”

“Yes. I usually want to know as much as I can, even if it’s random things. The more I know is the more I know and maybe I will understand everything better.”

I can feel her facial muscles shape into a smile and her head to turns me.

“That’s not what I meant love but listen to me. You’re not messed up. You aren’t you’re just you. In our own ways everyone else on the planet is messed up in their own ways. I’ve just met you and you’ve touched my heart, you are warm and sweet and honest and you care very, very much about people in a very beautiful and rare way.”

“Brandy?”

“Yes love.” She says with another smile and rubs noses with me a moment before kissing me. I love the natural glean of the coffee colors in her skin; I love those eyes of hers they’re so deeply brown and large and filled full of all those good feelings in the world. I kiss her this time, my head slightly tilted I hope I am doing this right. She smiles again when we part lips so maybe I did it right?

“Why are you like this? I don’t mean this transgendered part of you but the good parts. Why are you so good with how strange I am? It’s like you get me or get a lot of me.”

She leans on me and shivers a bit and I awkwardly put my arms around her to hold her. I think this is what she wants, needs. Brandy leans her head on my shoulder, it feels nice. I’ve never been able to do this for anyone before. It’s a basic human need even for people like me. We all want, need, wish for someone to hold.

I actually move us a little like we’re dancing. Brandy holds me too. Then she clears her throat finding words.

“I had a little boy that was Autistic when I was younger. It was before I really knew who I really was inside and I got a girl pregnant. I was trying so hard to run with the guys and be tough and everything I hooked up with her and we ended up having a baby together.”

“So you’re a mother then.” I look at her a little worried. “I don’t identify well with children Brandy, not even when I was a child.”

“”I know Madison it’s okay, when did you ever have a chance to learn right. No I’m not a mom…I’d love to be but…I was about twenty and going to school when I started to really discover myself. I’d been married to Shanna for four years going on five and we had gotten married as soon as we turned sixteen and before Samuel was born. He was born Autistic and we tried our best to give him the best life that we could but when I came out…when Shanna caught me she flipped out and divorced me and took my child away from me and moved to the states where she has relatives down in Baltimore…”

“And you can’t see him?”

“No her family has gotten an order against me that doesn’t let me see him.”

“You could fight it in court.”

“I tried but my own family sided with Shanna and they won’t have anything to do with me. My family is very strict and my dad says what I am is against God’s laws and my Mom said it’s because of me that Samuel turned out the way that he did. I haven’t been home or really heard from any of them or even my siblings in seven years, not since the divorce he’d be eleven now almost twelve.”

“That’s not right Brandy.”

“I know, it hurts so much honey all of it does but that’s my life. I just couldn’t live and not be the person that I have to be.”

“Yes, when something is true it’s true and not wishing or even saying that it isn’t true will change that. This is really easy to understand and I don’t understand why people who say that they can understand this really don’t.”

“Madison…”

“Yes?”

“You don’t understand because you’re not an asshole and sadly in this life there are just too many assholes.”

I kiss her. “Thank you that clears everything up immensely for me.”

Brandy smiles up at me which is nice actually being taller than her, I’m thin but I am of a not unfavorable height of five feet and eight inches. Brandy is perhaps two inches shorter than me. I get another kiss from her and another smile. I will never get tired of someone really smiling at me. I’m starved for the positivity of the gesture.

“C’mon beautiful I cooked up a nice breakfast and I don’t want it to get cold on us.”

She called me beautiful.

No one in my life has said that to me before. I had no idea that it would mean so much to me. I’m still processing the way that it makes me feel when we go into her kitchen.

This is not the kitchen of an exotic dancer. It is small and very cozy or this is what I would call it. Too small really for anyone but a single person to work in it but two very intimate ones could do it in a sort of dance? Its white painted old wood paneling and that has been edged with a border of hand painted flowers and vines and bees along with various butterflies and dragonflies and such things. There are painted floor moldings doe like grasses with cute tiny turtles and little frogs and even snails. It’s very pretty.

Her windows are old, the double pane wood framed ones that I grew up with and like the farmhouse I grew up in back home this place needs work that she just couldn’t afford.

She has there ceramic animals and glass animals like you used to get as a gift in the old fashioned boxes of tea. She even collects some very pretty tea tins too. I really enjoy the hanging pane shaped animals of stained glass dangling in the window. They catch the sunshine in a most pleasing way and the kitchen invokes this whole feeling of peace, of a hug in me that I can’t quite place.

Actually maybe reminding me of my paternal grandmother’s home. I’d only been there a few times as a child. Before my mother had left us and abandoned us. My memories of the place are disjointed but they seem to be happy ones. I haven’t thought about her for fifteen years or more.

I smile at the memory as brandy makes or rather serves up our breakfast. I’m happy and more so at everything. Her plates and china all match but have the crackle in the enamel of being old and well used and taken care of. I find the effect soothing in an interesting kind of way. She makes a proper pot of tea for us and has the things in their proper places for them. There are even napkins set out. The toast is good and the eggs are actually the best I’ve ever had, creamy and rich but not watery or browned. Then there’s the fact that Brandy had made homemade jam. It’s just something else that I haven’t had since I was a child.

“This is all very good Brandy; you do not do this all the time do you?”

“Actually I do because I usually work nights dancing I have my mornings to myself and I like things a certain way. The one person who never turned her back on me was my grandmother. She took me for the girl that I was and when my family threw me away she took me in and helped me get on my feet. She taught me a lot of things about being a woman and everything, as much as she could before she passed on.”

“You learned really well, this seems all very properly feminine.”
“It is my Nan was a nurses aid in World War Two and she ended up married and moving back here to Ontario with a British Pilot, she was determined to make herself into a nice girl that his parents would’ve been proud to have in the family. She knew all the stuff about being a proper lady and all that and she was more than happy teaching it to me.”

“Well I think your Nan raised an excellent grand-daughter, this feels all very good to me. I mean nice, I mean…” I duck my head in a blush.

“It’s okay Maddie love; I understand there’s this soothing thing about having a bit of order and control over stuff.”

“You do?”

“Yes, there’s a lot of ritual and preparation in just being a woman, honestly I think it’s some of the reason why we seem more balanced is because some of us like to see things like that. Long baths, leisurely breakfasts, reading the newspaper or a book while finishing a pot of tea. Cooking, baking, and cleaning my house are all soothing things about being a woman to me. Even dressing and putting on makeup let’s me think or just be at peace about my life or as much peace as I can find while I’m doing it.”

“You’ll show me? I...I...I think I could use something like that, like you in my life Brandy.” Just the calm yet passionate way that she talks about it actually has me longing for something like that. It has just often felt that my life is like freehand climbing. I’d cling from one or two things in my life that were my handholds. I never felt like my feet were on solid ground. Brandy’s description sounded like solid ground.

She smiles that amazing smile at me. “Of course Madison but let’s just relax first.”

I’m not sure what she means by relax but it soon becomes apparent. We take out time eating, really enjoying the food the tea. She reads the paper and reads it to me with the occasional “Hey Madison listen to this.” We clean up and do the dishes and she asks me to find some music I like online. She dances and moves with the classical music like nothing I’ve ever seen. She has this boneless grace with this almost modern dance like flow that she moves with the violins and hums with the cello and her hips shift back and forth and her hands will have a dishcloth and a dish in them and will move in time with the drums punctuating boom boom.

Once she finished cleaning and the dishes were away she moved more, like the music got more bandwidth in her now that she was finished.

She’s redefining my love of classical music for me. And she’s so randomly free, a living reforming fractal pattern. I mean half the time she’s just smiling with her eyes closed. The drums go boom, boom and her head even shakes whipping her hair from side to side. She opens those sultry eyes of hers and takes my hand and my waist… “Brandy…? I…I’m..”

“Shush Maddie, just close your eyes girl, feel the music, the beat, tempo, rhythm.” And in the middle of doing the breakfast dishes she teaches me how to dance, to move myself in a way that I’ve only ever felt by moving my hands. This, this lets that music feel like it’s soaking into me, and I’ve got tears on my face because it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done, this is incredible. It’s better than sex…actually I soon find myself hardening with the beauty and excitement of it and the feeling combined with the panties is just so…

Again…I do not have the right words.

But we moved to the bedroom, Brandy kept us dancing, turned up the music. She dropped her robe and danced naked with me. There was this part where she put lipstick on me before we started and we kissed, we kissed very, very much. We suckled each others nipples and while I do not have female breasts the sensation was very pleasurable. Brandy was a good teacher, showing me how to do for her by leading by example. She knelt at one point her brown eyes shining with excitement and before taking me into her mouth she said. “Violins Madison listen to the violins.” She performed oral sex to me too the violins playing in the piece her head moving to the music. She moved me…beyond anything I knew music to me. We made love on the bedding on the floor of her bedroom. Myself first inside of her, there is this security in the tightness, in her opening to me and letting me in, the feeling of her legs around my waist. Brandy did the same thing in a whole other way when she made love to me. She loved me so much she was becoming part of me, entering me. My legs holding her made it better she became this person who was letting me hold onto her as tight as I needed to… She guided me into lovemaking with the music, it was…It was more than I have words for.

Afterwards was a bit of cuddling. Then she put on the laundry and ran us both a bubble bath.

We take a hot bubble bath, she teaches me how to get “Cleaned up.” we shave, exfoliate, wash each others hair…that is so soothing to me. Having that done for me but also doing that too.

Brandy teaches me about lotion and baby oil right out of the bath, plucking and shaping my eyebrows, manicuring, pedicures, make up. We are hours in the bathroom playing, teaching, learning and being intimate in doing those things with each other. There is this so soothing ritual to it all. There’s this security in the feeling like nothing I’ve known and to put on foundation and powder and all these other things that take detail that calms me down, firms me up inside someplace deep in my psyche. Brandy’s more than pleased that I learn so well. I’m good at the details, By the time I’ve put my seventh attempt at make up on she’s neatened up my hair and styled it.

I look in the mirror and see the real me. It’s like several lines on code that were missing from a graphics program coming together and what you were seeing as a shape in the program becomes an actual image before my eyes.

Me, the real me.

As much a revelation as discovering the Universal Encryption, actually so much like it. Zeros and Ones, On or Off, Mathew or Madison.

I’m definitely Madison. Being Mathew was a bug in my formatting. I know I stared a long time at my real self and the thought came like out of the blue as they say. If I learned enough about the Encryption could I hack my own code? Could I fix what was wrong with me? Could I? I theory yes.

I know I was distracted by the thoughts of the code and wanting to dive right into the theory but until I really found out more and how these were things that I needed to know. Like how to dress.

Oh…oh…

New panties, and hose that go thigh high and I love that thigh high band of clinging rubber and elastic and the bra…I love the way that it closes around me, hugs me and Brandy loans me her very first started gel forms to give me a modest small B cup. They don’t show cleavage but give weight and shape. I’m in white lacey under things and as pale and made up and blonde as I am. I see a whole new me in the mirror, I see Madison even more and more importantly feel so much more myself, less fractured and dysfunctional and less strange. Getting into a cute Tee-shirt and ankle cut jeans that hold me a squeeze me right just makes me feel transformed.

I think I sort of look like my mother a little.

“I…God, Brandy…This is me., This is the real me.”

“I know, Maddie you’re beautiful and this is just clothes and make up.”

I nod still staring. “Once I start my HRT for my transition it’ll change me more.” I can’t believe just how different I look from the way I normally do. There is this whole layer of my usual anxiety that just isn’t there anymore…or right now.

“I think you really might change. You’re very naturally femme looking honey and I’m wondering if you might not have a touch of AIS.”

“AIS?”

“Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. It’s where your body doesn’t process male hormones very much or well. It’s like being male but you’re kind of allergic to being male.”

“I think you’re right, I’ve felt like that my entire life. I never ever fit in with any of the boys, guys , men in my hometown. I never thought I was transgendered, never I never had much experience with women in my life and I’m not good at anything normally social so I avoided those things and as I got older they avoided me.”

I turn and look at Brandy who is making the bed and smile at her. “Thank you.”

“For what baby?”

“You’ve changed things so much for me Brandy, you’ve made my life better in just such a short time. You’re my catalyst.”

“Catalyst is good right?”

“In this case yes. It is very good.”

She kisses me when she comes over. “Good. Now we need to pick out some boots and coats.”

“Why?”

“We need to get going and stop in at the police station and go over things and give your statement about the assault and the break in and then see if we can go and get some of your things and find some clothes for you and the stuff you’ll need as Madison. I love you honey but you need your own things.”

Most of what she said scares the heck out of me. I feel the tears well up from the memories and I’d be freaking out but. My lipstick seems to keep me from biting my lip, my hands are shaking though and I want to…I’m waving my hands a bit and trying not to count on my fingers or do worse or strange.

Brandy takes my face in her hands and kisses me deeply and long and slow and stares right into my eyes. “Maddie, look at me baby, look at me. You’re not alone, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I love you…I love you…We can do this.” There’s some more kissing and then she’s leading me outside to face down those horrible things my fingers intertwined with hers.