They call them groundnuts here, peanuts still damp from the earth, measured in tiny cupfuls and sold in overflowing handfuls for 200 hundred shillings each. I buy them on the road beside my house while I walk home at night. The woman who sells them to me takes the tray off her head and balances it in one hand while she scoops the nuts with the other.

They call them groundnuts here, or g-nuts, for short, but back home we call them peanuts. It wasn't until I lived in Africa that I learned that they come from the ground.

It is -10 where you are in the States; it has just become daylight. This week you will give yourself another shot of Testosterone in the thigh. You have just passed month three of your transition. I asked if I could be there when you do them from now on; if I could sit at a computer screen a continent away and watch the hormones that are changing your shape. Sometimes I am scared to tell you that your voice is already deeper. I think this means I am afraid of change.

The power has been going off here every night at 7.30, just as it turns dark. I light candles now or hold small flashlights in my hands. I navigate these rooms differently, when I am alone without light. Someday, I think, I will get used to this, cooking over a propane flame flicker, cutting tomatoes in the dark. This time I have not even been in Africa a month. I have not yet tried to count my changes.

Now I sit beside groundnuts, and peanuts, and g-nuts. I eat them raw, popped out of the shell. They are soft and chewy, a subtler taste without the salt I am used to.

“This must be the hardest thing in the world,” you tell me, “to be so far away when your partner is transitioning.”

It is -10 in the Midwest and just turning dark here in Mwanza. I don't think about changes as I slice open shells with my nails. Instead, I think about how if people back home heard the name for peanuts here, they would not recognize it. If I told people about the power going off, and the ants coming back, the water disappearing, and how many locks I have in my house, they might think I'm crazy. There are people I don't tell about you, how our bodies fit together, how your skin makes me alive, how the longer I know you the more I realize how much sense we make. I think about my own transitions, the ones I had to make before I even met you.

I think now about the different flavors for love, and all the women who carry baskets full of it that they wove themselves on their heads. I peel open shells and I wave mosquitoes away and I remember how graceful that woman was today, as she balanced that tray and we talked in different languages and we both understood.

They call them groundnuts here, or g-nuts for short, taken still damp from the earth, measured in tiny cupfuls and sold in overflowing handfuls for 200 hundred shillings each. Back home we just call them peanuts. I realize that some people don't realize this. Yet I still find it strange: if some people knew what I hold with both hands, they wouldn't understand. To me, all these names taste the same.