Another Year Home

One year ago today, I came home from my surgery.  One of the first things I noticed upon getting off the plane was the humidity.  After spending a week and a half with very little of it when I was away, I was amazed at just how much of it I and most other New Yorkers consider to be normal. 


That flight home was the first--and, so far, only--time I've flown first class.  It will probably be the only time.


So what's the difference between now and then?  Well, it seems that ever since I've gotten back, Charlie and Max simply can't get enough of me.  They're still treating me as if I just got back.  Both of them have always been very affectionate; they seem to have become even more so.  I always had a feeling they liked women better than men.  Hmm...I wonder what they would have thought of me before my transition.


If I felt as if a layer of skin had been stripped away a couple of months after I started taking hormones, I felt I shed another layer after my surgery.  So much affects me,and sometimes I feel as if I can look directly into people.  The nice thing about that is that the people I love, I now love even more.  But the other side of this is that I am less tolerant of bullshit than I used to be.  That accounts for some of my ranting about my job and about a particular person who's not in my life anymore.  


And somehow my perceptions about time--at least as it relates to my own life--have also changed.  As I've said, much of my recent past seems so distant now:  Things that happened two years ago could just as well have happned two centuries ago.  And the future seems so much more immediate.


What would the past year--not to mention my life--have been had I not had the surgery?