The Timeless Fluidity of T4T Love

“T4T” is where trans folks can speak with each other directly, from the heart, without having to make ourselves legible to cis society. Here, we will tell stories that center our joy and our pleasure, our rage and our resilience, our quirks, our dreams, our love. Here, no experience or idea is too niche or too wacky — we care about what you care about. Read more from the series here. 

“Do you think we were lovers in past lifetimes?”

I turn to my wife, half awake in bed, rolling on top of her, because she likes when I am her own personal weighted blanket. Sunlight pierces our rust-orange sheet, put up as a makeshift window shade. Facing away from the harsh light, I rest my cheek on the slope of Tee’s shoulder. 

We have loved beyond these bodies.

Experiencing intimacy with other trans people from my culture(s) was the first time I recognized how our love can transcend lifetimes. It is this ease and unspoken understanding that makes first dates feel like they last months. I met Tee on a beach in California. She looked like a cottage core lesbian, with her long floral skirt, cardigan, and bandana. I was a tiny twink in a beige bikini and milf shades. We looked like randomized sims next to each other, yet there was still something so in alignment between us. When I look back at the pictures from this time, now over two years ago, I’m struck by how well we fit together — my hand holding hers, my arm around her side. Years later, we hold each other in the same way, seeing each other not only in our current genders, but also tapping into the shared memories stored in our bodies.

As queer folks, we have experienced our ex-partners become best friends and our best friends become new lovers. We know that people play more than one role in our lives. These bonds influence us on a timeline that doesn’t start and end in one motion. We experience love in movement, at this place where trans connection, non-monogamy, and queer intimacy meet — beginning, middle, and end becoming beautifully muddled. And there is something so human about that, the idea that love is not what the person can be to you, but a feeling that shifts, pulls, rearranges, and meets its way back to you.

Tee and I always say that our relationship followed a very “Benjamin Button” process. We’ve gone from a domestic marriage in quarantine, where we spent all our waking hours together, to seeking some distance, time to take each other on dates like we’re new lovers that met on some cramped dance floor. It is this fluidity between lightheartedness and depth that colors our relationship. This love dynamic is present in my other T4T connections. The people in my life, other trans lovers, those bonds never strengthen or weaken: they just adapt to our needs, wants, abilities, and emotions. T4T love is non-linear in nature because of its openness to change. Our existences are based on transformation.

As a 2Spirit person, nature teaches me how to love. The mountains know connection and partnership — non-monogamy, too. When the clouds touch their peaks ever so briefly, or when fiery petals spread across buds on branches then fly off with the wind, it’s all like sweeties coming and going, punctuated by periods of solitary renewal. In these varying dynamics, all kinds of love shelter one another, knowing some stay, return, fall out, and regrow. There are people that I talk to for hours on end over the course of months, no expectations attached, that I meet in person and we instantly connect. The chemistry between us is so powerful it draws us into each other. Others I see after loving them intimately for years, begin to feel familial and the dynamic becomes an emotionally nurturing friendship.

I’m learning to accept that I won’t always wake up in the bed of the same nesting partner, that sometimes things need to drift for tides to pull back even stronger. Too often we think holding something tightly in our hands will keep it there. If our loves were water, it would escape our hands in an instant under such constraints. So I let my lovers fill up my space like bathwater. Something that I can return to that wants to hold me when it is there.

To the many possibilities and inevitabilities of my “romantic futures,” I understand that if my home space needs to shift, or my ties to others, then I will be open to that. There will always be another day where it can take a recognizable or former shape. I can be in a home again with a lover. I can go on another coffee date or park visit. We can love on many timelines.

Coyote Park is a photographer and the author of “Heart of a Shapeshifter: 2Spirit Love Medicine,” a collection of poems, short essays, and prose exploring transformation, non-linear transitions, ancestor worship, diaspora, T4T romance, non-monogamy, queer awakenings, and various intersections of Park's lived experiences. Published by GenderFail, with a cover illustrated by Ash Luka, and a foreword by Mimi Zhu, the text is available here.

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