On our first date, we ditch the Greek formal to make pasta. No one notices our absence. During the half-mile walk back to her fraternity house, Emily tells me she’s developed her own sauce recipe while I toddle alongside her in the high heels I’d never properly learned how to walk in. By the time we make it inside, it’s after midnight. The kitchen is sticky with forgotten residue, but we don’t let that dissuade us from cooking.

Emily just calls her recipe pasta, which is fair because I don’t think the bastardized sauce she reverse-engineered could really be called marinara. She dices green bell pepper into perfect squares, frying them with tomatillos (“Like tomatoes but different, which makes it more interesting and therefore better,” she explains), and stirring pesto into crushed tomatoes. Her sauce is unnervingly rich, slinky and oily and hearty. Spaghetti isn’t something I ate growing up, but at the end of a table meant to seat 30 men, I think, I could love what I’ve missed.

#

Early on, our pasta routine was wistful, as if we repeated the recipe well enough and for long enough, our lives might stop feeling weird and wrong, and our shared deep-seated ache would just melt away. We cook together for a year and a half before I get into graduate school and Emily drops me off at my parents’ home for the summer. She leaves a Tupperware half-full of our pasta in the fridge to remember her by. I don’t want to lose her tangibility, so it rots.

Four months later, we reunite in a scant apartment we share on the outskirts of our high desert town. On our third night home together, Emily finishes coursework for her last class, closes her computer, beelines to where I’m sitting two unfurnished rooms away, and asks if she can try on one of my dresses.

“Of course,” I assure her.

She steps into the dark blue lace and blinks, staring into the flimsy full-length mirror before she comes out to me as trans. “I’m a woman,” she says, and I say, “Baby, I know.”

Our ache had always mirrored each other’s, and at first I think supporting Emily through her own pain might help heal mine. I love the feeling of dating a woman, an experience I’d always craved. But interrogating what it means to be a woman’s girlfriend leaves an unexpectedly bitter taste in the back of my throat.

The night Emily starts estrogen, we make spaghetti to celebrate, cheering when she drops the teal tablet under her tongue. When she describes her mind going truly quiet for the first time later that week, I begin to recognize the cacophony in mine.

I don’t know if I’m Emily’s boyfriend, but I’m definitely not her girlfriend. Without any idea of where I might land, I come out in return. Emily and I erase ourselves and start over: the sauce loses tomatillos first, then green bell peppers to save time. Then, pesto, to save money. The two of us, past selves undone, sequestered in a desolate apartment, making our bare sauce recipe.

#

In time, we stop adjusting our pasta recipe. Instead, we mellow, tomatoes and herbs curing while we feel bad about our unchanging bodies, fearing our sluggish transitions are reaching their peak.

I leave our home for a month to write in solitude and come home to a radiant Emily, who has adjusted her estrogen dose and cut her hair in my absence. She smiles at me with her whole face for the first time and tells me about a new sauce recipe she wants to try.

Backlit by summer evening gold, Emily shows me how to roll basil leaves from the garden and slice them into equal strips. In return, I show her how to hold an onion while dicing it, curling fingertips away from harm. She scatters oregano over crushed tomatoes without measuring it, asking me to listen for the subtle seismology of the gut, telling me what you’re doing is right. Our bodies glide around each other across the kitchen floor, invigorating the lives we’d always silently passed through. She laughs when the first whiskers of my beard touch her cheek.

Emily’s new recipe is robust, bright, clear, and immediately recognizable as hers. But we don’t settle. Emily and I prepare new flavors for our new bodies, for a future together we didn’t always know we’d have. The pasta tastes a little different every time.
___

Lee Anderson is a nonbinary writer with an MFA from Northern Arizona University. Their Pushcart- and Best of the Net-nominated work can be found in Salt Hill Journal, The Rumpus, Gertrude, and elsewhere. Currently, they live in Chicago with their partner Emily and a cat named Pretzel.

Artwork by Kah Yangni