what once was couscous now is cocoa

"I'm not so sure I was always Eloise."

"Well, sure." Audril shrugged. "Not until you decided you were."

Until you decided you were. Code for, until you knew you were. Until you made up your mind about it, drawing from a state of indecision. Not, of a sudden, picking up and packing your bags away from something you'd always known, like your lonesome hometown.

"No, no..." Eloise shook her head, feeling the weight of it. "Like, I wasn't always heading towards me, here, now, Eloise. I chose more than just the name."

Which was a terrifying, bottom-dropping admission. Not just a crisis of identity, but the idea that she might be lying, to herself and to everyone around her. And for what?

"I'm just..."

(That was where mid-life crises came from, right? Realizing that you'd sunk your whole life thus far into whatever, whoever and wherever, it was you were, and it wasn't all that great. Wasn't anything to show for itself. Wasn't a versatile place from which to pivot to something else - anything else. You'd approached a dead end, in career or relationships or all the blurry blitz in between, and it was too late - far too late - to change that ignoble trajectory that had been trending, trundling downward for some time now. Too late either to do it meaningfully or to do it at all.)

Eloise didn't, on the daily, feel trapped in who she was. A little stagnant, maybe. A little itchy. She had days where she looked into her tooth-brushed face and smiled despite herself. She had days where she didn't.

But she didn't, generally, have days pervaded by fingernails clamped into too-dry papery palms, every gram of fat making itself scarce in a time when she needed comfort the most.

Audril wasn't one for providing comfort. Audril wasn't warm, not like that. Their usual tack was to fill in the beats that needed placing, pulling Eloise along to what was most sensible and what they honestly weren't sure she didn't already know for herself.

Here, they observed the crisis, flirting with entering into it, by folding it back over to the last mutually audible sound.

"You're just not Lusine. So, you're putting your energy into Eloise." Can't go back, right? Haven't made any specifically wrong or bad decisions yet. Did the mature thing and cut your losses, there. "It'll probably work out just by virtue of that conviction alone."

Surprise humanism. Sure. Maybe what Eloise wanted was someone else, grounded in the room with her, to vocalize the chorus in her head - What do we want? Major lifestyle change. When do we want it? NOW!

But Audril could be irritatingly, soothingly practical.

"How is it so easy for you?"

"Probably because I'm not trying."

Trying. Of course. And Eloise, meanwhile, tried too hard. Pitched too far. Wanted so badly to be something that she had abandoned all anchor to dry land.

"Everyone knows I'm trying. It's that little stretch in the way they say Eloise - like they don't really believe me, because they know I don't really believe me?"

Her inflection had begun to climb; it was the whine that preceded the roar.

"Don't you?"

"Obviously not, God, Audril! Obviously I don't!"

"Obvious to them, or to you?"

"To you. You know, don't you? You have to know!"

Audril said nothing, swallowed. Such a damning deliberation it turned out to be.

"You have to be hearing it, the way everybody wrinkles their nose at me. I chose this name. I chose it! So why does hearing it just make me feel worse?"

"El..."

"And everyone's always giving me extra time to do things! Do they really think I'm that slow? Do they not expect me to be able to do anything for myself?"

"They're giving you time to get to skinny," said Audril, squinting up into the ceiling-light halo around Eloise's heaving face. "They don't know that it takes forever. Since it's where they started."

On the topic of choices, Eloise suspected that that was part - or most, in a microcosm - of why Audril, freckles and bones, had never swung full tilt into the feminine definition of womanhood.

"After all," they'd muse, "who wants to be Audrey Skeleghetti?"

Thus, Audril. Starting out with a girl's name and a guy's frame, they'd drifted over to a point where, as they'd often opine, "The person who made me is sitting somewhere doing an interview, saying, like, 'Audril's gender is an odd number that's divisible by two,' y'know. Or vice versa." (It alternated depending on the day.) "Which, like, yuck," they'd conclude, "but...a good yuck."

Many of Audril's principles were based on "a good yuck". Their pronouns, he/they, were to be used along the following heuristic: "In a room full of shes and hes, they. In a room with only she...he."

"You've just gotta be special, don't you?" Eloise had asked, rueful. And her partner had shaken out his auburn mane and replied, "I don't make the rules. I just observe them."

Audril had just such an innate rule of cool, too. Their friends Nicolean Thebes and Thio Mentauski were dubbed "The' and Yo" - looked ridiculous on paper, but sounded right out loud. Sort of the inverse of their dubious dating status. Eloise's younger brother Vartan, in combination with their family name of Asadonian, was known to the friend group as "Aston Vartan" despite his decided middle-of-the-road-ness in all aspects.

Because they weren't trying. And now the conversation, or at least Eloise's mental map of it, had turned into a meditation on what it took to just...abstain from gender. What it took, and what it gave: more time to focus on other meaningless minutiae that somehow colored life into a rainbow. Again, effortlessly.

"Could you imagine being anyone else?"

Eloise couldn't even contemplate the actual question without first noting to herself that it was this, this careful, studied thoughtfulness, that revealed Audril's true deeper neuroticism, or whatever it was. A scratchiness in their voice, thrown low. A certain tilt in their head. Those telltale flicks of his eyes.

Everything else about their discussion thus far would suggest them to swing a neon-radical dangle out of a magazine-splash beanbag chair, wrists akimbo. But Audril, direct at the best and worst of times if they weren't busy straying inert, was pulling the ground back in beneath Eloise.

She'd opened her mouth halfway to the birthing of a response when Audril caught that wince in her cheeks that meant she was flinching at the very effort. He couldn't stop it from spreading to her eyes and darkening her entire gauzy gaze.

"It takes too much energy," he said softly. "I can't even say that I've tried. But you have to find something smaller. You can't just do all of this right now."

As Eloise began to shudder, and Audril reached behind them to dim the lights on the harshness of reality, the refrigerator asserted its presence with an ungainly hum.

We're just here in your parents' house, Audril thought but didn't say. If ever there were a more grimly potent reason not to be settled on the fitness of the rest of your life, middle-class sexually-inactive white-passing queers hadn't seen it.

That being an uncomfortably narrow thought to end on, Audril grabbed Vartan's mug and started some tea.