“Hey, how’s it going?”

Trevor asked the question as I entered the living room of our shared apartment. He was sitting in his favorite spot on the couch, cup of coffee steaming on the low table in front of him, phone in his hand. An endless stream of pictures floated upwards as he slid his thumb over the screen in a continuous loop. I had answered this question hundreds of times before; it should be no problem to answer this time.

Was he really interested in my answer though? He hadn’t bothered to look up as I came in the room, just continued scrolling through the pictures of strangers on his phone. I couldn’t blame him- I always gave the same non-answer every morning. We had been best friends since high school and shared an apartment for nearly five years now, but our relationship never got very deep. We talked about the good and bad things that happened, and that was all. Experiences involving emotions beyond that had never been discussed and were now taboo. Aside from that, I wasn’t sure how to answer him.

My eyes had been opened last night. It left me feeling a strange mix of terrified and exhilarated, confident and ashamed. My entire identity was in question now. How do you tell someone that you’re not the same person you were when you went to bed the night before?

That wasn’t entirely right either, though. I knew I was still myself, just more myself. A new side of my persona had been unlocked. A part of myself that had been hidden away years before Trevor and I had even met.

She-Who-Should-Not-Be was what I named her when we first met in the still and the dark of a warm summer night. My elementary school brain didn’t understand who she was, but knew how to deal with her. She wouldn’t be understood or accepted by my family, so she had to be locked away. It was for her protection as much as my own. By morning I had renamed her She-Who-Must-Not-Be and purged her from my memory.

Now she was back. She had grown in the dark and the solitude, subconsciously gathering bits and pieces of information to nourish her. She had renamed herself, and the newly minted She-Who-Will-Be would not be ignored. I saw her in every reflection now, hiding behind my beard, lurking underneath my cold, familiar eyes. She was me and I was her; to continue denying her existence would tear me apart. I needed to be me. I needed to be free.

But how to explain this feeling of being torn apart and formed anew? I looked no different aside from the spark of life in my eyes. On top of that, people like the new me were not often met with open arms and open hearts. How would Trevor respond? Would he yell and scream? Would he smile? Would his smile hide a knife? She-Who-Is raged in my heart and mind. She demanded to been seen and accepted. I knew I couldn’t let her out yet, for her protection as much as mine. I finally knew how to respond.

“I’m fine.”