Conditional Lover: A Journey to Becoming Real
- Conditional Lover is the story of what happens when the cost of pretending becomes too high. From the shadows of a boyhood silenced by shame to the pulpit of a church that might not survive his truth, Dee’s journey is one of raw faith, deep loss, and unexpected resurrection. When God’s whisper called him to live fully as himself—as a transgender woman of faith—David became Dee and faced the unthinkable: losing the life he built to find the one he was meant to live. Told with the lyrical honesty of confession and the courage of rebirth, Conditional Lover is a memoir about love that isn’t earned, faith that isn’t tidy, and the wild grace of becoming real. It’s for anyone who’s ever been loved conditionally—and dared to believe there’s more.
Conditional Lover, tells the story of how I discovered the truth about love only after it was withdrawn. For decades, I was David — husband, father, pastor — a man my family cherished and my congregation admired. Then I came out as transgender, and the love I had built my life upon disappeared. The family who once called me “beloved” now wants nothing to do with me. My grandchildren, who once called me “Grandpa,” now look away, undeterred by their parents. The people who claimed their love was unconditional revealed the “if” hiding in every embrace.
Conditional Lover traces the journey from that shattering to something sacred — the slow awakening to a love that can’t be earned, lost, or revoked. Told through five movements, it blends memoir, theology, and lyrical reflection, exploring how family, faith, and identity collide when truth enters the room. It’s a story for anyone who’s ever been loved until they were honest.
Love, Me: Letters I Wrote When I Wanted to Disappear
Love, Me: Letters I Wrote When I Wanted to Disappear is a genre-defying memoir told in letters—raw, poetic, and unflinchingly honest. Through this epistolary format, author Dee Grachek invites readers into her inner world as she navigates life as a transgender woman coming out after decades of silence, shame, and survival.
At the heart of Love, Me is a radical refusal to disappear. With the voice of a pastor, a poet, and a survivor, Dee writes through the ache of rejection and the quiet beauty of becoming. Her letters chronicle not just a transition of gender, but a transformation of spirit—a reclamation of voice, faith, and belovedness.
Love, Me: Letters I Wrote When I Wanted to Disappear is a genre-defying memoir told in letters—raw, poetic, and unflinchingly honest. Through this epistolary format, author Dee Grachek invites readers into her inner world as she navigates life as a transgender woman coming out after decades of silence, shame, and survival. These are not just personal reflections—they are mirrors for readers who have wrestled with their own identity, faith, grief, or longing to be seen.
Love, Me: Letters I Wrote When I Wanted to Disappear is a genre-defying memoir told in letters—raw, poetic, and unflinchingly honest.
The Letter I Wrote Myself
- At twenty-five, David appears to have it all: a promising career as a stockbroker, a polished image, a carefully curated life of success. But beneath the surface lies suffocating silence — an identity hidden, a truth buried. Everything shifts when a mysterious letter arrives, written in his own handwriting, signed by someone he has never dared to be: Ava. The letter dares him to imagine a different life, to step out of the closet he has built, to live authentically. The arrival of the letter sets off a journey of shattering and becoming. At first, David wrestles in silence, reading and rereading the letter, haunted by hallucinated dialogues with an older self. The closet feels safe but unbearable. In a chapel, alone and trembling, he whispers the words that break everything open: “I am Ava.”
At twenty-five, David appears to have it all: a promising career as a stockbroker, a polished image, a carefully curated life of success. But beneath the surface lies suffocating silence — an identity hidden, a truth buried. Everything shifts when a mysterious letter arrives, written in his own handwriting, signed by someone he has never dared to be: Ava. The letter dares him to imagine a different life, to step out of the closet he has built, to live authentically.
The arrival of the letter sets off a journey of shattering and becoming. At first, David wrestles in silence, reading and rereading the letter, haunted by hallucinated dialogues with an older self. The closet feels safe but unbearable. In a chapel, alone and trembling, he whispers the words that break everything open: “I am Ava.”
The Veil Awakens
- Two weeks after gender-affirming surgery, Maris begins noticing the city “talk back”: hospital lights blink in time with her breath, a mirror seems to inhale, and in sleep she walks a damp corridor where a drip and a tick keep time. Evie—an unsentimental neighborhood herbalist—names what Maris’s healing body already suspects: surgery didn’t create magic; it tuned her to thresholds. Bodies are altars. Doors are promises. Maris is a hinge—a witch whose power lives in the space between. News breaks: Emily Santos (22) is missing. Police lean “runaway.” Drawn to the riverfront diner where Emily was last seen, Maris slips behind a nearby church annex and—guided by that new, uneasy sense—finds Emily’s snapped pendanthalf-buried in winter grass. Detective Jonah Reyes, a steady pragmatist, bags it without mocking her instincts, but warns her to stay away from the annex. At a vigil led by beloved pastor Reverend Holt, Maris tastes something wrong: chalk sigils (two crossing lines, a circle broken by design) and a cultivated hush that feels like teeth. Holt is a collector—of attention, fear, and silence. Evie arms Maris with simple rites: oil to bless her scars, salt for thresholds, rosemary for memory. At home, Maris sits in her doorway and claims her body—anointing the surgical map, speaking her name aloud. Power doesn’t slam; it arrives like dawn. The mirror deepens, an ancestral Watcher stirring, as Maris’s dream-corridor clarifies into the annex cellar, a rug hiding chalk, and a bricked-over door. A teen informant, Tasha, shares a night photo of a volunteer’s ring bearing the same broken-circle sigil. Pushing too far at the annex, Maris nearly folds under the “hush with teeth.” Reyes intervenes; he wants her alive more than he wants explanations. That night, Maris performs Evie’s rite fully: bodies are altars; doors are promises. Owning witchhood on purpose, she stops begging to be let in and begins opening from where she stands. Reyes secures a warrant (2 p.m.; “stay behind the tape”). Maris obeys the tape—but not the silence. Holding the threshold in her body, she speaks to the building’s purpose—sanctuary, not cage—while Reyes and officers pry at the false wall. The cellar yields. Behind a panel: Emily, alive, bound and fearful of uniforms. Reyes talks her back to herself; Maris keeps time with a quiet litany—“you’re breathing.” Holt arrives to seize the narrative, the hush trying to heel to him, but Maris names the room’s promise and the chalk un-makes. Temperature rises; the engineered quiet lets go. Holt is arrested, his ring (a portable gatherer of directed muteness) seized. Aftermath: city cameras “corrupt” not the moment, but the half-second after—the space where witness would land. Evie identifies the ring’s lineage; the Order behind it eats erasure and calls it virtue. In transit, Holt is extracted—GPS and dashcams fail in the “after,” transfer logs revised. Maris convenes a vigil for the living at the river; people speak, and she gives them the “after” so truth arrives out loud. A reconnaissance trip to a retreat upstate (the Order’s “Quiet Convocation”) reveals chairs etched with the sigil; from the public road, Maris burns a small counter-charm and three would-be recruits simply walk away—no raid, just unarmed silence. Meanwhile, a riverfront dig peels back an old almshouse: unacknowledged bones and a ledger of names. The fight is larger than a pastor; it is civic. Maris ends not as chosen savior but as function: “I’m a door. I open where you close.”
Two weeks after gender-affirming surgery, Maris begins noticing the city “talk back”: hospital lights blink in time with her breath, a mirror seems to inhale, and in sleep she walks a damp corridor where a drip and a tick keep time. Evie—an unsentimental neighborhood herbalist—names what Maris’s healing body already suspects: surgery didn’t create magic; it tuned her to thresholds. Bodies are altars. Doors are promises.Maris is a hinge—a witch whose power lives in the space between. News breaks: Emily Santos (22) is missing. Police lean “runaway.” Drawn to the riverfront diner where Emily was last seen, Maris slips behind a nearby church annex and—guided by that new, uneasy sense—finds Emily’s snapped pendanthalf-buried in winter grass.
Proof & Promise
- Claire Bennett keeps a ledger, turns her plant east, and asks for things in writing. Two years out of college, she opens Proof & Promise, a modest advisory office that becomes the locus of a quiet scandal when a prestigious firm starts “streamlining” accounts off the books. With Daniel Hale—a features reporter who writes toward her, not over her—and a chorus of working-class allies (a typist, a janitor, a copier tech, a locksmith, and an auditor from Kearney), Claire helps the state build a case that privileges process over pyrotechnics. As a full tape surfaces and a city adopts simple reforms (record meetings, preserve tapes, notify participants), Claire and Daniel build a tender, domestic romance out of verbs: ask, note, keep. The result is an upmarket love
Claire Bennett keeps a ledger, turns her plant east, and asks for things in writing. Two years out of college, she opens Proof & Promise, a modest advisory office that becomes the locus of a quiet scandal when a prestigious firm starts “streamlining” accounts off the books. With Daniel Hale—a features reporter who writes toward her, not over her—and a chorus of working-class allies (a typist, a janitor, a copier tech, a locksmith, and an auditor from Kearney), Claire helps the state build a case that privileges process over pyrotechnics. As a full tape surfaces and a city adopts simple reforms (record meetings, preserve tapes, notify participants), Claire and Daniel build a tender, domestic romance out of verbs: ask, note, keep. The result is an upmarket love