That I could be so completely intelligible as a transgender person to this stranger, that my body and my experience required no explanation, was beyond what I had imagined. I was enamored and disoriented. I had been talking to him forever, but I didn’t actually believe he existed.

The month that followed is a single block of time in my memory. I remember him holding my face in his hands one night and saying, “Alic, you’re a well-rounded gender.” He laughed self-consciously, but that was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever said to me. Another time he held my hands in his and said: “Alic, you’re a very special person. Being with you makes me feel like I’m a very special person too.”

He’s easy to love.

Kevin forgives quickly and believes that the universe is benevolent. I used to think that his positivity was rooted in privilege, that he somehow saw injustice and oppression differently than I did — or didn’t see it at all — because he’s cisgender (his gender identity is the same as the gender he was assigned at birth). But I’ve come to appreciate that he is not ignoring so much as he is imagining. In sharing our lives with each other, we invite each other to see beyond that which we ever imagined for ourselves.

Kevin and I were married on May 6, 2017, in Alameda, Calif., in a beautiful garden surrounded by our chosen family. More than anything, I wanted people to feel at home. I wanted our friends to feel free to be their unique, complex and creative selves. Perhaps in doing so, I was making up for all of the times I felt out of place.

There was one thing, however, that I couldn’t make up for. When I came out to my father as transgender, he suggested that I see a doctor about taking more estrogen, rather than testosterone, so that I could feel like a woman, that maybe they could “fix” me. Later he told me that he was embarrassed to be in public with me and that it would be easier to explain to people that I had died.