It was a beautiful sunny afternoon when a couple of friends and I went for a walk through the botanical gardens, which was lovely. Whenever I go to something like that, I take with me my little poetry notebook in case I get inspired. I don’t write the poem right then. I make notes that I use later to remind myself of my thoughts.

Part of the way through our walk, I stopped to make some notes. My friends commented that they were wondering where my mind wandered off for a time as I scribbled in my little notebook. I made up something about a pond. But that wasn’t so, it was something else. I saw a snail. It left a trail shimmering in the sun and that made me think about someone and something that happened several years ago.

It was 1990 when I met a woman at work. She was a brilliant mathematician and I was a research scientist. We were together for just one year. We shared interests in science, technology and literature. I was struggling with my gender issue at the time, and she was a chain smoker. Some say that would be a deal breaker, for either of us, but she put up with my crossdressing, and I put up with her constant smoking. It worked for a while. Then, we amicably parted ways in 1991, and I started my transition shortly there after.

A few years back, I received an email from a mutual friend that she had passed away from lung cancer at age 52. Even though I had not seen her in a long time, the news affected me. And I wrote this poem about that moment.

After The Rain

A garden snail leaves a silver trail.

She moved equations like breath through a reed,
She sketched circuits on napkins,
and smoked Luckies beneath Saturn’s rings
while I dressed like my dreams.

We shared midnight theorems,
Einstein and Dickinson tangled in bed sheets,
her laughter a volta in a sonnet’s turn,
my truth still half-written in the margins.

Her addiction, a slow-burning fuse.
My gender was a chrysalis refusing wings.
We built a life on borrowed time,
a cardboard fortress where we hid

from our own wars.
When we parted, no slammed doors,
just two satellites, orbits drifting apart.
Stay kind, she whispered,

Stay kind.
Years later, her obituary arrived,
like a failed experiment’s conclusion.
Lung cancer, at 52.

All our unsolved variables
collapsed to zero.
If only…
If only equations healed,

if smoke could reverse into breath,
if I’d handed her the scalpel
to cut me free sooner.
Tonight, I trace her ghost

in the snail’s luminous path.
See? she murmurs,
even the fragile leave something…
That shines.