You always called me angel. At first I didn’t like that. It felt dysphoric, which was confusing, because you were trans yourself, “more” trans than me, having spent years on testosterone, having looked, even before any intervention, more like a guy than I ever could. Sometimes, even now, almost two years since you’ve been gone, I look at pictures on your social media. In your trans adolescence you had short wavy hair, flipped up in sexy cowlicks. You were tall—you were always tall, but when you were skinny it was most striking—your arms wrapped around some hot punk femme, flexing your cactus tattoos.

You had one tattoo I especially loved, that I stared at whenever you weren’t paying attention. I told my girlfriend about it, a much-tattooed motorcycle rider who was the most cautious person I’d ever met. I said, “MC has my favorite tattoo. It’s half fish and half woman.”

And she was like, “You mean a mermaid?”

I hadn’t even realized how foolish I sounded. “The other way around.” That big-lipped, gaping trout head, those stout female thighs.

When my ex-girlfriend, Gabby, called to tell me you’d died, I already knew. She’d texted me saying she had sad news and had to call, and right away I knew it was you, and that you’d done it on purpose. You didn’t take care of yourself. You drank too much and didn’t sleep, you threw yourself at women recklessly—I knew, because I did too.

We had shouting dinners in packs of queers—outrageously delicious because you worked in restaurants all your life and knew what was good—a long, chatty day at the beach in Santa Monica with Gabby and your girlfriend Emily (my old friend), passing between us a bag of soggy fried potatoes, where I hardly wanted to swim, my favorite thing, because I didn’t want to stop talking. We went camping on the shore in Ojai. You said we’d just pull over and sleep in our cars and when we reached the dunes every sign on every beach warned us against this very practice like the whole shore knew you were coming. We groaned and dragged you, but no one was surprised. When I wasn’t on the West Coast you texted out of nowhere, when I hadn’t thought of you in months, “what up bud” or “beautiful angel.” Emily said you loved me. We were going to take a road trip that summer, just us two, but I didn’t take it seriously even though you hounded me. I wish I’d pushed for it, made it work, at least checked my calendar. You were chaotic. You didn’t plan. I knew our road trip wouldn’t happen, despite the dreams you texted—it was meant to start on your cousin’s turmeric farm in North Carolina—and it never did happen. Because you died.

I’m not going to include the most gutting facts of your death in here. You’ll never know, of course, but your funeral—organized and funded by your loyal friends—was the most beautiful event I’ve ever attended. Emily sang for you and cried, there were candles and bare feet in an open barn in the part of Texas where cottonwoods loom, live oaks with their silky moss. Everyone you loved took the stage. People talked about how affectionate and annoying you were, how difficult and charming. A woman from 12 Step said you were hot and cheeky, back when you were young and trying to get sober. She seemed straight, but her crush glowed through. Your younger cousin told us he had no friends as a child, but every year for his birthday you’d buy pizzas and invite a bunch of people, make sure he had a party, and didn’t even tell anyone you’d done it. Never got credit, didn’t care.

I don’t want to make what happened about more than you. Because it’s your life, and being about you is enough. And I don’t have the capacity to talk about what is going on out there right now in the world of trans politics. But I’m rarely angry—usually only sad or anxious—except when I think about how real, living people who I assume have the muscle to love at least one thing in their own lives have purposefully crafted the world this way, decades after knowledge and acceptance should’ve been obvious. And into it came you, with your own pain and the intensity of being trans that even in a vacuum can be unbearable, with your reckless spirit, loving everyone too hard. You should’ve been allowed to be free and hectic and sad, and to live through it. But this world was not hospitable enough to let you survive with what you carried. And so I can’t help but blame it for your death.

My first novel, which I dedicated to you, is about a feral musician who you would’ve definitely seduced, but who also approaches the world similarly to you in some small ways. When younger queers accuse me of writing about messy trans people who do questionable things because that kind of representation is bad for the community, I always think of you. Because you were a scamp, and you were hard, but you were beautiful and perfect, and you deserved to be written about by a hundred queer authors, to live your life and leave its history without a worry about the sanitization of representation. When I asked Emily to write a song in response to the book, she wrote a song that could only be about you, full of pain and longing and forgiveness and understanding. It’s my favorite song I’ve ever heard, and I listen to it all the time. The refrain—“all the time we had was all the time we had”—loops in my head for days. I think of you, but I also think of everyone else I’ve lost and everyone who I still have who one day I won’t. At first I worried it was wrong to write about your death in terms of how it impacted me, but knowing and loving you is tied so deeply to writing sloppy trans freaks. And honestly, you would’ve fucking loved it. And if this essay is messy and abject or amoral, then it is the perfect tribute to you, and all the ways we are alike, the ways I’m proud of and the ways that scare me. Because when you died, I was on the edge of a change in my life, and it was partly losing you, and the certain knowledge I could go the same way, that pushed me out the other side.

Lydi Conklin’s novel Songs of No Provenance comes out June 3.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!