I should have known better. I did know better. But I also thought I knew the risks, and apparently some of the risks aren’t ones they teach you in astronomy courses.

The total solar eclipse of 2024 was a date I’d had marked in my calendar for years. My best friend Steve and I, known as the Astronomy Bros even in high school, hadn’t been able to make the 2017 eclipse in Tennessee because we were only 17 and our parents had deemed the trip from California to be too long. But this time, we were in our twenties and young professionals who had cleared our schedules for Monday, April 8 well in advance. We were even lucky enough to have a college friend who lived in Dayton and was willing to put us up in her spare room for a couple days.

I had never packed for anything in my life as carefully as I had packed for this trip. Most trips, you can find what you need where you go, so missing a pair of underwear or whatever is inconvenient and possibly expensive but not disastrous. This time, it was different. We’d had matching shirts custom made – black shirts with white edging on the hems with “Eclipse Bros” embroidered on them – we knew that if we forgot our eclipse glasses, we wouldn’t be able to find another pair anywhere, and we were on an extremely tight schedule - the totality would last about three and a half minutes, and you can’t reasonably ask the literal moon to wait a bit if you’re not ready.

So of course, despite our careful preparation, things went wrong.

First, we overslept. I know what you’re thinking, how the fuck do you oversleep for a total eclipse happening at three in the afternoon. In our defense, we’d gone out with our friend and her fiancé the night before, and we drank a lot. Also, we weren’t just aiming for the totality, we wanted to watch the entire eclipse. Sleeping until noon did not work for that.

It turned out that going to the park at all was a bad idea - we’d have been better off in Sally’s back yard. It wouldn’t have had the community atmosphere we wanted to experience, but it would have been more personal and a lot less crowded. We could barely move from all the people trying to view the eclipse with varying levels of safety. Some had poked holes in paper to serve as mini-projectors, lots were wearing eclipse glasses, and a handful were looking to burn out their retinas by using regular sunglasses or in a couple cases of particular dumbassery, nothing at all.

We’d brought Steve’s telescope and the correct filter for solar viewing, but the mass of people gave us nowhere to set up. Sally asked if we wanted to go back to her place, but Steve and I were determined to watch as much as we can from where we are using eclipse glasses. Sally and her husband, Stan, wished us well and returned to the peace and quiet of their own home.

Around 2:00, we started to become relieved we hadn’t brought the telescope; things were getting crowded enough that it probably would have gotten jostled and less useful for viewing anything apart from stray clouds. Around 2:30, the atmosphere began to resemble that of a concert with standing room only, both in feel and in aroma, and I started feeling claustrophobic. I signaled to Steve that I was going to make my way to the outside of the crowd, even though it would impede my view. I was going to do the best I could.

After I spent a few minutes catching my breath, I went back into the crowd, looking for Steve. I spotted him around 3; he was already wearing his glasses and catching the moments before partiality turned to totality. It took a few minutes to make my way over to him. I checked my watch - five minutes to totality. I looked up through my glasses - the sun's light had become just a thin sliver, and was continuing to shrink. This was going to be everything we’d hoped for after all.

I’m… not 100% certain what happened after that. Maybe I wasn’t watching where I was going. Maybe someone else wasn’t watching where they were going. Maybe it was just the kind of accident that happens in a crowd this large and tightly packed.

All I know for certain is that I felt the impact of my body against someone else’s, saw the increase in illumination as my eclipse glasses fell off my eyes, and heard the crunch of someone - perhaps even me - stepping on them.

I stood nimbly and considered my fate. My last and best plan to view the eclipse safely was crushed, and we were three minutes from totality. I had to either miss the eclipse I’d spent years waiting for or take a calculated risk of damaging my eyesight.

A hush started to fall over the crowd. I quickly made my choice. I had spent seven years planning for this. We had driven across the country, not willing to trust Steve’s telescope in the hands of airport baggage handlers. It would be literal decades until the next total eclipse anywhere closer than Mexico or Alaska. I took a chance and looked up. I saw the last of the Beads disappear from view in the “diamond ring” effect, and the total eclipse began.

For the next two minutes and forty-five seconds, I was transfixed, unable to pull my eyes away from the dark circle surrounded by a thin ring of light in the sky. I heard nothing around me. The smell of the crowd vanished. In my awe, there was nothing between my naked eye and the moon’s shadow, and everything around me had ceased to be. I felt light and airy, and the temperature drop sent a pleasant chill across my arms and legs.

I heard a voice that I vaguely recognized call my name as totality ended and the second diamond ring appeared. I averted my eyes from the sun and moon and looked for the source of the voice. As I did, I noticed through some eye floaters that my surroundings had changed. Instead of being in a crowded park, I was in Sally’s back yard, with Steve’s telescope set up for solar viewing. Steve, Sally, and Stan stood near the telescope. Sally and Stan were looking up at the fading eclipse wearing eclipse glasses, and Steve knelt near the telescope, looking at me with a worried expression. “Babe? Why didn’t you say you’d dropped your glasses? We could have shared the telescope. You know looking directly at the eclipse is bad for your eyes.”

I shook my head and waved him off. “I’m fine, Steve, really.” My voice sounded odd, but I had been shouting to be heard over the crowd for a couple hours now. I blinked a few times, trying unsuccessfully to clear the spots. “I just need to head to the bathroom for a second.”

Steve nodded and looked back into the telescope. “Okay, honey, just let me know if you need anything or if those spots don’t clear soon.”

I headed inside, then stopped as my brain caught up to what I had heard. Babe? Honey? Steve and I were close, and we’d made jokes about how we’d be made for each other if only we were gay, but he’d never used affectionate language like that with me before.

I started walking more quickly, my bare feet relieved by the cool tile floor as my heart sped up to match my walking pace. I reached the bathroom, closed the door, and looked in the mirror. My well-manicured hands flew to my mouth as I managed to stifle a scream into a gasp. More than the scenery around me had changed while I was staring into the eclipse - my physical body and even clothing had changed too.

I was no longer wearing a shirt that proclaimed me to be an “Eclipse Bro”; instead I was wearing a similarly designed dress that declared its wearer to be “Eclipse Queen”. It covered a slight body with mild curves and small breasts, the dress cut low to show what little cleavage this body had to offer. My hair was no longer short and straight, but long and curled. My nails were painted blue and decorated with the phases of a solar eclipse, and I wore a bracelet with a sun-and-moon motif. My face resembled a feminine version of what I’d previously known, with only faint makeup.

My confusion grew as I looked down at my unfamiliar body. I didn’t have a wallet or purse on me, so I couldn’t check for an ID or anything like that… Wait! This dress! It has pockets! I checked the pockets and found a cell phone just like the one I owned before I stared at the sun but with more feminine-themed science stickers decorating it than the “gender neutral” ones I remembered putting there. The phone recognized my face, and I briefly inspected my text messages. I’m now “Ashley” instead of “Asher”, but everyone still calls me “Ash”. There are more texts from Sally - apparently Ashley and Sally are besties - and I blushed as many of the texts referenced Stan’s performance in the bedroom… and Steve’s? I checked Ashley’s texts with Steve, which confirmed a relationship between them but left out the spicy details that Ashley and Sally were sharing.

I thought about this for a moment, and realized it made a kind of sense. If Asher and Steve were good friends who joked about being in a relationship, then it follows that Ashley and Steve would be in one. Well, that is going to be interesting later.

A gentle knock on the door interrupted my, well, self-inspection. “Hey, Ash, you okay?” I could hear the concern in Sally’s voice. I pocketed the phone, put on my best performative smile (which is really quite a cute smile), and opened the door to reassure my bestie.

I helped her fix some themed post-eclipse snacks - think “dark circle with light circumference” and you’ll get a good idea - and we chatted idly about Steve and Stan. I tried to listen more than I talked to learn more about the life I’d found myself in and did okay at steering the conversation away from the sex questions I couldn’t answer and probably wouldn’t be comfortable with if I could, but I ended up having to do my fair share of “guessing what I’d say if I’d lived my life as a girl and hoping Ashley did the same”.

Of course, nothing prepared me for the direction Sally was steering the conversation toward, so I crashed headfirst into “So when do you think Steve’s finally going to propose?”

I almost choked on my drink. “What? Oh, I don’t know if we’re quite ready for that.”

Sally rolled her eyes. “Sure, just pretend while he’s standing out there that you didn’t spend half the drive out here complaining that he was taking you to watch diamond rings without showing you a diamond ring first.” I didn’t know what to say, so I just let my mouth hang open. Sally continued. “Besides, you’ve been together for what, eight years now? And you two nerds skipped school to time your first sexual encounter with the last total solar eclipse, even though you couldn’t be there? I was sure he was going to bring a ring out today before he set up the telescope.”

“I don’t think that’s really Steve’s style,” I replied, thinking back to relationships that the Steve I remember was in. “He likes to combine his romance and his significant events, but he tends to wait to make the romantic gesture… until… afterward…”

I looked over at Steve as I realized what I was saying, noticing that his shirt had changed too, naming him “Eclipse King” instead of “Eclipse Bro”. He was watching me nervously. When he noticed that my eyes had moved in his direction, he turned away, starting a conversation with Stan that I couldn’t see. I turned back to Sally, whose eyes were suddenly widening. “You don’t think…”

She interrupted me. “I don’t think you should be hanging out in here with me and the snacks, no. I think you need to get your nerdy ass out there with your nerdy boyfriend and watch the end of the eclipse - safely,” she added with a coy smile.

Damnit, I recognized that tone. That was Sally’s “I’ve already decided what you’re doing and you’ll be better off if you just go with it” voice; I laughed at Stan every time she used it on him, especially when they were planning their wedding.

I checked myself in the mirror before I went outside just in case I was exposing Ashley to a picture-taking opportunity, not that I’d have known how to fix anything that needed fixing. My face and clothes looked okay, so I headed back into the yard and nonchalantly checked the telescope. My identity crisis and subsequent conversation with Sally had taken up about half of the eclipse’s back half. What was left was visually inspiring, but neither entrancing nor life-changing.

I heard Steve clear his throat behind me. I turned around slowly to see him standing on the lawn, looking embarrassed. “Hey.”

I smiled at him. “Hi.”

“How are your eyes?”

“Much better, thanks. Did you enjoy the eclipse?”

“Not as much as I would have if you’d been safer, but yeah. You?”

I laughed. Wow, Ashley had a nice laugh. “For all the complications it took getting here, I loved it.”

He smiled. “Good. I, uh, wanted to ask you something.” I waited, and he continued. “I know we sort of got things started with us during an eclipse, and we’ve made making it to this eclipse a big part of our relationship.” I nodded, encouraging him to go on. “I know the next eclipse around here isn’t for a while, but…” Oh shit, I was right, here it comes. He pulled out a box and got down on one knee. “Will you share the next eclipse and every one after it with me?”

He opened the box. I couldn’t help but look, even though it was for Ashley, not for me. He’d done well, though - the ring featured a black diamond, between one and two carats, set into a thin, uneven ring of white gold. He’d managed to set an eclipse into an engagement ring. Along the band were the more traditional white diamonds.

My breath caught. When Sally had first suggested that Steve would propose, I thought about how I should respond, how Ashley would have responded. After I’d guessed Steve’s timing, I hadn’t been able to think of anything else. Now, standing in front of a man offering the person he thought I was a ring, I realized I was asking the wrong question. The question wasn’t what Ashley would want - that was an unknowable quantity. Instead the question was, given my experiences with my Steve, what would I want if I was a woman and we were sexually compatible?

In that framing, the answer was easy, and that’s why my choice to look at the eclipse without eye protection somehow has me standing back in Sally’s bathroom, tears in my eyes and a ring on my finger. I’d texted Ashley’s parents and Steve texted his family, and we agreed to keep it between us (and Sally and Stan) until we got home.

It really is a beautiful ring. But it’s not mine. Maybe if I can look into another eclipse, I can deliver it to its intended recipient?

I pull out Ashley’s phone to double-check when the next solar eclipse in the US is, and groan when I see the result. If I don’t want to go to Nome, Alaska - and who wants to do that - the next American total solar eclipse is in fucking 2044. After twenty years, this will end up being more my body than Ashley’s - I’ll have given birth to her children and shared twice as much of her life with Steve as she had.

I check instead for total eclipses anywhere in the world. Hmm… There’s a total eclipse in August 2026 that covers Iceland and northern Spain, just outside of Madrid and Barcelona.

I look at the ring on my finger - Ashley’s finger, I correct myself - again. Another eclipse in a different country sounds like it would be a nice honeymoon, and this doesn’t seem like a bad life to live for the two years between now and then.

And as I think of Steve, my new fiancé, and feel how Ashley’s body responds to those thoughts, I realize that if I can’t switch back, it wouldn’t be so bad to keep this life forever.

I may even decide to keep my glasses on for the next eclipse.