The red winbreaker

I was looking through my male clothes separating them in things to donate to charity and things to keep. I found something that didn't bbelong to me, it was my best friend's red windbreaker.

Before I came out as trans I had a home and I'd love throwing dinner parties for all my friends. My friend was always leaving his jackets behind and I would always phone him to pick them up. Weeks or months would come and go before he would actually come and pick them up.

He was a newspaper reporter working for the AP and he got a promotion to lead the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez office so I gave him a going away party the day before he left with all our friends.

Dude fucking leaves his red windbreaker. A month later he's back in the country fixing some legal stuff up with his ex wife and he wants to meet up in a bar before he leaves again.

I show up with his windbreaker. He tells me to keep it. I tease him that I'm not a storage locker and he  puts his hand on my cheek and tells me.

I want the people I love to always have a piece of me in their homes, just to remind them I'm with them.

Afterwards I started struggling with my gender identity really hard and started having problems in my marriage. He would forever tease me that I was gay, and those jokes started getting under my skin. We talked less and less. He told me that if shit god bad in my marriage I was welcome to stay with him in El Paso to have short vacation and think about what I really wanted to do with my life. I was on the brink of coming out to him a couple of times but always chickened out.

Faced with the terror of saying something out loud that would change my life forever I took the coward's way out and stopped talking with him. I told myself that someday when I was ready I would explain why I had drawn away and stopped talking. We kept chatting on Facebook and social media. He had a blog that would later be compiled into a book where he mentioned me a couple of times.

One day I had a fucking busy day in the office planning the budget for the next year and justifying safety training and green energy changes and other HSE stuff that my job entailed with as the CFO that had come from Costa Rica. I had left my cell phone home so I wouldn't be interrupted. When I got home I had some 40 missed calls from the US. I knew what had happened before I made that call.

He died of a massive heart attack, cooking dinner in front of his children. I try to imagine how it happened and everyone being confused because he was so fond of slapstick comedy and faking feinting and actually faling down when he was upset or surprised.

I had to make the calls to close friends and all the women that he had loved and that had loved him in Europe, Guatemala and the US.

His mom lived in the US with his sister who had a PHD scholarship and his other sister who had started a business of her own. The memorial service and his cremation were held for him. I can ony imagine his mother's heart breaking. She had had a massive heart attack as well but had been saved by a quadruple bypass operation.

The group of close friends we had got together and held our own memorial service. Afterwards we went to a local bar and I told them about the red windbreaker. Everyone had a similar story about stuff he had left in their houses.

Little by little everybody left until it was just me and a school friend we had in common. We drank and talked about things and how our relationships were falling apart with our spouses at the same time. Without thinking about it or perhaps because I was drunk, I took out my phone and logged into Imgur. I showed her one of my first pics where I looked semi decent. She looked at me perplexed and asked me if my father had been cheating around and had another family. I did a double take and asked her what she meant. She asked me if the person in the photo was my sister.

I told her it was me. I started crying and told her I was trans. She asked me if I was trans like Caitlyn Jenner or if I only liked to dress up. I laughed cried and told her I sort of was like Caitlyn Jenner but truly was nothing like her.

I put the windbreaker in the pile of things to keep. I don't think I'll ever able to wear it.