From the other side of the glass door

Oh my god... we just shifted. Me and Anna. She wanted to, urged me to let her take my place, and I felt eager about it as well. She wanted me to masturbate with her, to let her feel it the way she wanted to, and during that jerk off as I tried my best to please her, we gradually switched places. At orgasm, the shift was complete. Immediately after she thrusted out of bed and nearly tipped over at how our body's weight surprised her. And she stumbled us into the shower... oh my god, she is so dysphoric about how we look, it was so painful to see and feel how wrong she felt in her own skin. In the shower she kept asking me "what next" and "what do I do now" as I guided her to how I usually clean myself. She was excited about the shift like she had been freed, and I paid attention to her clumsy, feminine movements. She told me I shouldn't use so much soap for our pussy, that it wasn't good for it, and took a much smaller amount than I usually do. And washed it much more gently and carefully while inspecting it. That weirded me out a little, but let her have at it. She was on the other hand very fucking rough with my hair and it kept breaking in her hands while I yelled at her (in thoughts) to pleeeaaase be careful with the damn hair!

She really felt awful about my beard though and begged me to not force her to clean it. I said please, it's gonna itch if you don't and you will hate that even more. She sighed out in noticable pain as she said okay and very hastily washed it with my regular schampo and barely even rinsed it. But I mean I'm thankful she actually managed to do that at all. I'm proud of my girl. She also had a lot of issue with my body hair in general and was particularly grossed out by that on my stomach. But she also sighed out "even my arms are so hairy". Eventually she just had enough of our naked body so stepped out of the shower and struggled with the towel for a while and said it was because she's never bloody used a towel before. I guided her a lot with her movements and I was partially in them, but I didn't and couldn't take over completely. Not like she would let me! But she was also very thankful for my guidance to help her move. And she got more stable and secure as she kept doing stuff, and eventually she didn't need my guidance at all.

After drying up she got really excited about clothes and asked me glisteningly if I had any dresses lying around before she happily stormed out of the bathroom towards the big wardrobe in my bedroom. There she rifled around for quite a while before she found a long, flowy skirt made of a transparent black fabric over a light beige satin-like fabric. She really liked that skirt and her smile felt warm within me. Then she asked me about panties cause she didn't want to wear men's underwear and I was like... "I don't think I have any of those..." But lo and behold, she actually found a pair that I had stuffed into a moving box in my living room. They were regular shape, ivory coloured and partially silk-like, partially lace. She slipped them on under the skirt and instantly felt relief while she happily exclaimed "panties!" So uhm, yeah...

Oh yeah, all the time she kept hiding her chest with her arms and talking about wanting to find a bra somewhere as well. She did find a purple one in that same moving box (that used to fit our B-cup chest before I had top surgery, it was the last bra I bought before op, sometime in 2012, for drag) and when she put it on and cupped her hands around the empty bra cups she said it felt better, that it didn't need to be much, just something. She also found a wrap-around women's short sleeved shirt there that she noticed matched the skirt perfectly. I told her I had never noticed those two garments would go together before. Huh.

When she was done assembling an outfit she said she wanted to see it in a mirror but also not. She said she didn't want to see her face... it was sooo painful for me when she walked towards the mirror with her hands covering her face, near panicking over what she'd see in the mirror. I told her she could try to just cover the beard with her hands and eventually she dared to look and shyed away from the mirror gasping, then looked again, looked away, tried to only focus on what was below her neck until she saw chest hair and panicked again. She said she only saw me in the mirror and I could feel that pain that basically steamed off from her... it was so intense... Her voice was only slightly higher than mine and softly raspy, I noticed it was difficult for her to find some pitch she could work with, but her tone sounded much more natural to her, more feminine and melodic than mine. I told her that she sounded different in my head, to which she said "I'm not in your head now" meaning that she's different when she's freed.

Then she walked over towards the balcony exclaiming she really needed a cigarette. I asked her if she wanted shoes and literally not even a second later she turned and stubbed her toe into a chair and yelled "yes! shoes would be good!" I thought that was pretty funny. She walked over to the vestibule and looked at a pair of shoes I bought at a thrift store some weeks ago. "What about these? You never wore them" she said and picked up one of them. I said they might not go with the outfit but she insisted. They are kinda sneakers, but in a kinda goth style with a black lace print on a black background. Then she walked out for a smoke, held the cigarette in her right hand where as I always hold it in my left. And she blew out the smoke, where as I always just breathe it out. She stood by the house wall on our balcony, in a shyly, yet proudly womanly pose, almost like a photo model in a fashion magazine. She gazed out at the neighbourhood below us, and said she wanted to go outside. I told her please not to, that people would think we're a drag queen. It upset her but she agreed it would be a bad idea. I felt she wasn't feeling well, close to passing out so I urged her to please sit down on the chair. She didn't want to but eventually caved in and agreed it was probably a good idea.

Her dysphoria was really the most prominent out of everything. I had no idea it was that intense... and she said she didn't know that either. That it took her by surprise. She was close to crying as she kept accidentally touching my beard and it freaked her out every single time.
"Please let me shave it" she pleaded with me while holding back tears. I told her:
"No, please, I love my beard... please don't do that"
"Okay I won't, I know you love it... but I can't bear it... please think about it? For a next time?"
"I'll think about it..."
"Please actually think about it, don't just say you will!"
"I'll try..."
"How long does it take to grow it out?"
"I don't know, about a month or two..."
"Fuck, that's long... I don't even have breasts anymore, but the beard is worse. I can't hide it"
...she said and what really struck me there was that, although it pained her so much, she didn't want to make it worse for me. If we're gonna switch more often, we really do need to think of a solution to the beard situation, cause that was just too fucking painful for me to be crushed under her reaction to it. And I want for her to feel at least a bit more free.

I called her a lady as she walked inside again and it made her almost dance a little as she said "you're the only one who's ever gonna call me that" which saddened me a lot, but at the same time... I kinda wanted to think I'll let her out more and even let her pass as a woman... I didn't really feel any noticable dysphoria myself when it was her in control over our body, despite her efforts to present it as female. I was way too busy being nearly crushed by the weight of her dysphoria. And it's way too difficult of a situation to try to handle when I get dysphoric over looking female and she gets dysphoric over looking male. What that means for me being trans... I have not yet figured out... but I got a slight fear that maybe I was wrong about being trans, when I felt her extreme dysphoria over my male traits. I don't know how to react to that at all. Was it even my own feeling or was it not?

She wanted something to eat and told me I do that too seldom, but then her own lack of appetite reminded her of why. She made a cup of tea and took some cake from the fridge. She barely took two bites of the cake as it turned in her stomach. But the tea soothed her as she also smoked another two cigarettes. I asked her to turn on my phone so that I could look at my screenshot picture of one of my WoW characters. A very pale, undead blood elf with azure blue coloured hair, eyes and a small goatee on his friendly face.
"You like looking at his face" she said as she picked up the phone from a small waistbag, that she had earlier said also matched her outfit, that was very black and bronze through every garment, including that bag. She put the phone with the picture up on her lap and let me look at it.
"I can see why like him. He has a very soothing smile, like he wants to comfort, and like he's very understanding and accepting" she said.
"I know. That's why I like looking at him so much" I responded.

For that last cigarette she smoked she kept accidentally touching my beard much more and it bothered her really a lot. I tried to help her figure out some way to hold the cigarette that wouldn't let her keep touching it but didn't manage to find such a way. She kept twitching and forcing back tears, she was tense to the point of physical pain and I knew that her emotional pain and sadness had increased massively to the point of it being unbearable for her. A very familiar image popped up in my mind and I said:
"You're the woman I keep imaging I could have been in a distant future... that mental picture that keeps following me... I always thought it was somehow me in a way I couldn't understand, but... it's you" as I shivered at the thought.
"Yes, that is me" she confirmed. I recognised it in her body language and the softly stern, almost ageless feminine vibes she gave me, as she gently played with the fabric of the skirt in soft, small, circular motions and gazed into the air above the street below us. I know now why that image has been haunting me ever since my teens... that's how she saw her own future. It was never a weird distant dream of my own that I couldn't make sense of... it was her dream... and I took it from her.

"How old are you?" I asked her gently.
"Your age. Kind of. I couldn't age the same way you did. I never felt like an adult, and I never felt like a child" she answered. It made me realise just how very damaged she was. All the anger and hate she had released onto me, was really just immense pain that she hadn't known what to possibly do with. Like a wild animal trapped in her shrinking cage, she had bit the hand of her master who had starved her. How could I ever blame her? I simply cannot.

"Please take care of that stuff after me, okay?" she said and shook her head in the direction of the plate with the cake she couldn't eat and the empty tea cup that stood on the table.
"Yes of course" I replied.

She took a next drag and pulled it in deeply, very deeply as though she tried to suck out all the poison in it at once, before she put it out and got back inside. She almost cried, struggling to release the tears as she said:
"I want to switch back now... it hurts too much... please I need to go back..." and I tried to comfort her yet feeling a constant fuck I want to go back too...
"We should lie down in bed, maybe that way we can switch back. I'll remove the clothes for you first so it won't make you dysphoric. Keep them close, so I can wear them again next time." she said calmly with a very sad voice. Back indoors again her sadness nearly compressed her, immensely strong, as she slowly undressed herself, and when she took off the panties lastly she pointed at them and said in the most heartbreakingly sad voice I've ever heard:
"Little stain" as I know that our genitals is the only thing female she has left to hold onto. Now I really fucking understand why she panicked so incredibly hard to the point of threatening to cut our post-op genitals up, when I contemplated getting bottom surgery a year ago. She loves her pussy really a lot. Much more than I can even begin to fathom. Oh how fucking horrible I feel. What have I done to her?

She lied down in our bed and put a hand on my shoulder as we both begged each other and ourselves to switch back again, both scared what if we'll be stuck like that. She promised me we wouldn't, but then she started fearing it too. I started panicking as she told me to breathe and relax, that it would help then. I tried my best and I told her to lie as still as she could. I told her in my panic:
"I love you" and she responded with a vague whisper:
"I love you too" and then cleared her throat and said it again, clearer to let me hear it properly. It was incredibly soothing. Eventually our body felt different to me, more familiar again and for a moment I held my breath before I flew out of bed and gasped out "it worked! oh my god it worked!" and then I fell into a heavy cry. I cried for her... for the tears she couldn't release herself.

Then I stroke and held my beloved beard thankful I didn't let her shave it, and put on as masculine clothes as I could find. I felt her movements still lingering in my limbs as I shook them to find my own movements again, and I felt an intense need to smoke even though technically it can't even have been two minutes since that last cigarette she smoked... but I craved cigarettes as though it had been hours. Well, for me it had been. I looked at the plate of barely nibbled on cake and it was so strange. It was as if I was staring at someone else's left-overs. It didn't feel at all like it was my own mouth that had eaten those two bites, when their absense stared back at me.

The song we both listened to intently on repeat during our shift still played on the phone. It's the first and only song I've ever heard her say that she liked, and she tried to sing along to it while she made tea in the kitchen. I'm gonna need to hold onto that one. It's "Von den Elben" by a German group called Faun. It's a ballad in a medieval inspired style. It sounds like a lullaby. I just looked up what the title means in English and fuck it made me let out a sudden and hard cry... I don't know much German so I didn't know... but it means "from the same."

So now I've gotten to know her even better. And I know I don't have to fear her. Her pain, dysphoria, sadness and remorse are so extreme... but her heart is warm, like that cup of tea she drank deeply. She's been trapped in me for so long it drove her mad and dangerous. And me transforming the only thing she had... her body, into something she couldn't stand... I have no idea why she forgives me, but probably for the same reason that I forgive her for that she raped me. Now we're licking each other's permanent wounds and comfort each other, instead of yelling and creating new wounds. It is beautiful, what we have now. I feel a strong love for her and acceptance, and I know she feels the same for me. I've never felt this close to her before. She's like a book character that never made into an actual book, scrapped by last second, but remained on the tip of my tongue in a half finished sentence. She's that dreamy cocktail queen who mourns the life she could never have, somewhere far away. She's a shadow of a person, yearning to have her own body.

Wow, and here I complain about being stuck on an island... really puts things into perspective. Her pain is also mine, but it's not entirely the same, cause we have different perspectives on everything we've been through. We are not like twins, but more like two strangers too different to get along, but forced to stay and stick together. I need to heal her as much as I need to heal myself. But where do I even start?