I blinked and I was her again.

I didn’t even need to look at my reflection to know it. I knew it innately. I could feel it in my body, in the way that my body responded and felt the world around it.

It was perhaps the most difficult part of things for me to wrap my head around that the moment I became her it all felt so right to me. It was like I’d been pulling on the wrong pair of shoes my whole life and they were tight and binding or they flopped around but regardless they hurt, they made my arches and soles ache.

Then I slipped into her shoes and it all fit snug as a bug in a rug. It caressed my foot, feeling both there and not there at the same time. Like a second skin with the perfect amount of support.

It was like coming home, and for a man like me who has his whole life centered around being the version of himself that he knows he needs to be that can feel so disarming.

But when I was her again it was impossible to deny in me how good it felt to be in her skin. As I stretched languid as a cat a smile played across my lips and I kept my eyes closed but god I could picture her. I could picture every part of her just as easily as if I was staring in a mirror.

I am Matt. Matthew to coworkers. Matty to friends. When I am her I am not Matt or Matthew or Matty, I am Madi. Madison if you want to be formal but no one had ever been formal with Madison.

Madison is a unique kind of girl in that she’s one of those women where nothing in particular stands out about her on an individual basis and yet when you take it as a whole… Well you might miss her the first time. Her slight frame and her small stature might mean that when you’re looking across the club you take her in with a single glance and then slide right on by.

But then something will stop you. Something will make you realize that you missed something and you’ll go back, this frantic panic in you that makes you search until you lock eyes with her and you realize that you’d been searching for her all along. Not just from the first time you saw her, mind you. Not just from tonight. No, Madison was the girl you’d been looking for your entire life.

Her skin smooth and flawless and slightly coppery. Her eyes a pale grey that seems to float with insubstantiality and balk at being watched at the same time. Those wide cheekbones that lurid scarlet hair. Those lips that were begging to be kissed and to witness them part like the petals of a flower, her whole atmosphere somehow indecisive and enthralling, almost dizzying to perceive.

But you’ll notice things. You’ll notice how slight she is but that she stands with an inner strength. You’ll notice that her body is defined but smoothly soft. That any part of her seems so slim and tiny that you could wrap your hand around it and her whole body as a whole seems so flighty and insubstantial that you think if you picked her up and tossed her into the air she might never come down.

Madison was like a fey being, something from a different realm far more perfect than our own. She was wispy, almost, willowy and smoothly dreamy and if your response is anything like mine just seeing her once might be enough to make her stick forever in your mind but then of course it wouldn’t be the same for you.

You would only ever get to see her. You might get to be with her if you were lucky. I got to be her, body and soul.