Fetishism and Leather
I liked masks. Type and shape never mattered—as long as it covered the whole face, anything would do.
When I was little, both my parents worked and came home late, so from the moment I got back from school until evening, the house was mine alone. Every so often, in that empty house, I would put on a mask and stare at myself in the mirror. The figure reflected there never quite felt like me—it felt as though I had become someone else entirely.
I liked that feeling.
It wasn't that I had any complaints about my looks. Back then and now alike, people often told me I had "a pretty ordinary face," so objectively speaking, I'd call my appearance perfectly passable. Overly self-conscious? Nah. Probably not.
Self-loathing was even further from the truth. I was quiet and slow to warm up to strangers, sure, but I had no real complaints about my personality either.
It was, so to speak, a kind of performer's fetish. The very act of playing someone else stirred a pleasure in me I couldn't quite explain.
Whenever my mood turned sour, I would sometimes close my eyes and picture it: myself in a mask and a tailcoat, standing on a stage, performing before a crowd of thousands. And in time my heart would ease, my emotions settling down again.
This fetish of mine eventually tangled itself with my adolescent longing for the opposite sex and took root as a single yearning: I wanted to become a woman. Every night before bed, I would pray for a surprise to happen—like waking up one morning to find that, ta-da!, I had become a pretty girl!
Of course, nothing of the sort ever happened. Reality is cold and cruel, as they say—there was no room for fantasy.
Until just a little while ago, that is.
"Ah... ah."
I try my voice, carefully at first. A tone that could never be mistaken for a man's shimmers at the edge of my hearing. I raise a hand to my head, and sleek black hair spills through my fingers, falling past my shoulders all the way down to my waist.
I tilt my chin down, just a little. Before my eyes is a chest no normal man could ever have—so full that even both hands together couldn't hide it. Bending at the waist, I pick up the phone lying on the table and take a selfie. Looking back at me from the screen is a woman in her early twenties, her cat-like eyes sharp and fierce, her expression somehow a little goofy.
"How is this even possible?"
I put on the leather I'd ordered online, and became a woman.
For real.