He put the letters up around his bedroom mirror. I wrote back on thick paper, sometimes sprayed with perfume. His love letters landed like a blow, knocking the wind out of me. He wrote me letters nearly every day, and I responded like clockwork. We lived two states away from each other and on the weekends would meet in the middle in Boston, spending long days together. He had started testosterone shortly before we met, and the double-exposed photos seemed to show his body as a specter as the hormones took root. Haunting photographs hung on the walls, a ghostly kind of self-portrait of his changing body. My first love went to art school, and early in our courtship he invited me to a student show of his photography.
