My miscarriage was the best thing that’s ever happened to me; the next night, I went out drinking to celebrate and to inform the man who impregnated me. I felt like it was the right thing to do.

Daniel didn’t ask me why I wanted to go out and drink, because I pretty much always wanted to go out and drink, and when we met up at the bar he was in his Tulane hoodie and a pair of military surplus boots. I couldn’t believe I let a man who wears college merch from a school he got kicked out of impregnate me. But he was sexy, sort of, like a walking mouth. Philosophically dirty, and with huge twitchy hands. He had a thick Louisiana accent, dirty mouthfuls of swamp water, and a sort of stereotypical bisexuality you wouldn’t normally find in a man who packed his bottom lip with wet brown shreds of chewing tobacco.

When he saw me, he took me under his arm, pressing me into his side. His skin was always warm, and he smelled musky, like cat fur. He liked physical displays of affection, liked to put his hand in my back pocket in public and to finger me in movie theaters with his other digits in my mouth, crushed between my teeth. It never seemed to matter much to him where we were or what we were doing or what the good old boys around us thought, because what other people thought of him was peripheral to the main focus of his life: the pursuit of sex with as many human beings as possible. His whorishness was almost iconographical; you never really got the sense of what he gained from it other than the empty satisfaction of fulfilling that weird compulsive urge. What did I gain from it? I liked fucking him and he treated me like a regular man, not a false, embarrassing replication. Me being trans never seemed to make much of a difference to him at all.

Obviously, I couldn’t have his baby, because he was who he was, but also because the idea of existing in the world as a pregnant man made me sick to my stomach, and I’d been on testosterone for so many years I’d lost count and my high dosage could cripple the tiny, growing thing. I’d already scheduled the abortion and taken the time off of work to drive 500 miles to receive said abortion and mentally and emotionally prepared myself for the turmoil. But I’d done it all for nothing, my agony was pointless. I couldn’t have been happier. My throat buzzed in delight.

“Buy me a drink, Daniel,” I instructed him. “I need to tell you something.”

He bought me a whiskey sour and got a PBR for himself and we sat in a dark booth with spiderwebs in the corners and ripped chunks out of the vinyl seating. The walls dripped in cheap multicolored Christmas lights that flashed mutedly, with half the bulbs already dead and hanging useless. I figured I would tell him about the miscarriage in a bar so he would be forced to control his emotions and not freak out, because the last thing I wanted was to deal with his bullshit on top of my own. I didn’t really care what he thought about it, didn’t want him to be sad or happy or anything but passively accepting of the facts. But I did have this urge to tell him what happened which I couldn’t square away with my conviction in my own autonomy. I had planned on telling him about the abortion too, only I never got the chance. He had no right to my body, but he did have a right to know. I believed that in my bones, in my gut, in my contracting womb.

“I had a miscarriage,” I told him straight away, as soon as he took the first sip of his beer. “It was definitely yours, so don’t even start.”

He stared at me for a second, completely still aside from his swallowing, before knitting his eyebrows and leaning forwards like he hadn’t heard me. “What?”

“You heard me. I went to the emergency room yesterday and they had to give me the ol’ D&C.” I made lascivious wet suctioning sounds with my mouth, flicking my wrist in imitation of the electric vacuum aspirator. I wasn’t awake during the procedure, but I’d watched a million videos online about the process and considered myself a minor expert.

“Are you serious?” Considering the fact that we’d never had a “serious” conversation, I understood his incredulousness. “Is this really where you decided to tell me?”

We were in our favorite spot, a gay bar on Bourbon Street called Cocteau’s, a proudly dive-y joint where the drag queens came onstage with cocaine caked in their nostrils and their wigs slipping off the backs of their heads. It was admittedly a very strange location to have that particular conversation but that’s exactly why I picked it: you could never be sad for long in a place like Cocteau’s. That’s if he was sad at all, which I wasn’t in the slightest and couldn’t understand why he would be either. It’s not like he would have wanted me to keep it. I felt light and unburdened and I rested my small, soft hand over his and smiled. “Don’t worry. I was going to abort it anyways.”

“But– But hey, wha–” He sputtered, color drained out of his face, retracting his hand from under my own, which stung a childlike part of me. It was like being shushed by your mother. “You didn’t think to tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.” I took a placid sip of my drink, sucking a considerable amount through the tiny plastic straw, and tried to remain as relaxed as possible. Maybe, I thought, it would rub off on him and he would chill the fuck out a little bit.

“You’re fucked up for doing this here,” he said, looking like he might stand up for a second before sagging back into the booth, putting his palm against his forehead. He acted like I had just told him I was planning on keeping it. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, and I definitely didn’t think he’d take it as one. “I thought you were on birth control?”

“I am. Sometimes it fails.” The implant in my arm pulsed uselessly. I often fidgeted with it inside my flesh.

“And the testosterone? It doesn’t, you know…?”

“Shrivel all my eggs up like grapes gone bad? I suppose not.”

“Jesus Christ.” He wouldn’t look at me, just kept his eyes closed and shook his head like he wasn’t agreeing with what I said. “Jesus Christ. What the hell are we going to do?”

I didn’t understand what he meant at all. “Nature already did everything for us. We don’t gotta do nothing except pay my medical bill.”

He finally looked at me with depressed, weary eyes. For such a notorious womanizer (and manizer and nonbinaryizer) he seemed oddly touched at the idea of our conception. As if I truly mattered to him, as if having a child with me was going to be the thing that saved his damned soul. As if we would’ve gotten our shit together to provide for it, as if he would’ve quit whoring to be mine forever, as if he would’ve held my hand as I pushed it out of my cunt. If I knew nothing else in this world, if I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing there, in that bar, with him, I knew it never could have happened that way.

“You were pregnant with my kid. That means something to me. It don’t mean anything to you?”

Did it? It ought to have, I thought. For around eleven weeks, I had a life growing inside of me, germinating. Something I had created, atom by atom, through my own body. When I miscarried, it was the size of a fig, and my uterus still cramped around the lack of it as I sat there in Cocteau’s. A horrible, cruel, beautiful thing had happened to me, and for my child I felt I should have had more positive feelings. Shouldn’t I pray to see my baby in heaven? Shouldn’t I cry, or wish that it hadn’t happened that way? Shouldn’t I dream about it, give it a name, carry it in my heart forever?

Perhaps I should have. I didn’t. There was nothing even resembling sorrow, or regret, or a wish to turn back the clock. All I felt was relief. I was proud of my body for expelling what I so desperately did not want. If I felt anything about the miscarriage besides relief it was that: gratefulness for what my uterus had done for me. I imagined that it had rejected that dreaded intruder out of sheer hate and rage and misery.

I took a sip of my drink, felt the liquor run back behind my teeth, and grinned. “It means nothing to me. Nothing at all.”