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Content Warning: This piece of creative nonfiction includes the use of a slur and its use reclaimed, as well as a brief scene involving the threat of violence.

 

Act I

My mother always said, borrowing from Lois McMaster Bujold (who was borrowing from Robert Frost), Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to let you in. When I was laid off and burning through my savings at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, she said it again. The duty and warmth expressed in that sentiment felt the way love should feel, until I came home and discovered its delusion. This is your home, my parents insisted, you will always belong here. But over the assurances of the few, the rural places of America chorus, Remember what belonging means, daughter-thing.

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I’m just shy of twenty-one going on eighteen when I find myself behind the wheel of my Nissan Cube, up to my ears in what precious belongings survived my fifth move in two years. I can’t afford to rent storage and there is no real estate in my parent’s basement, so anything that can’t be tetrised is purged. The loss of it all burns me up inside, but the fire leaves me clean, mobile, light as ash.

Heading east out of the rain shadow, the basalt-scabbed hills run gold with spring balsam root that desiccates into dry savannah by July. Nestled in the horseshoe of the river, The Dalles’ cherry orchards are verdant Eden amidst wheatfields and oak-dotted grassland. I pull up to the house that raised me—largely unchanged, though wanting a fresh coat of paint—and my childhood bedroom welcomes me home. In the dry heat of the summer night, the lights of the baseball field down the street still glare through the curtains and outside the night comes alive, as it does in all small towns, under the wary eye of mostly-stray cats.

I spend the first months falling in love with a rescue dog and touring my old haunts with her and the ghost of my teenage self. The dog never knew the ghost and doesn’t care to belong anywhere but by my side, so we are alone together. I discover that home isn’t just a place, but the sum of all its memories. Here is Agony Hill, I say to the dog, where I first experimented with cross-country running and later with marijuana. From its top the North hills are blond, and the river is placid as a mirror’s face. The dog says, I love being here with you. The ghost says nothing.

Look, dog, here is the Cherry Heights overlook, where I did not kiss a beautiful boy and later, on summer nights, the quiet kept me company. Keep driving past orchards and No Trespassing signs and American flags and here is our favorite walk, the Chenoweth Tableland Loop. The ghost says, try not to think about the boy you walked with who, tragically Catholic, advised you that dinosaurs are a hoax. I fail that, but we sit on the cliffs for a time, and I give the dog a kiss on the knobby top of her head. This high up, the air-traffic lights suspended around the hydroelectric dam are right where I left them, winking like red eyes in the night.

It’s a sleepy, spit of a town, where change flows through the streets like molasses.

Downtown is a looping chain of eight traffic lights that my foot on the accelerator times with perfect accuracy. I have a chance run-in at the new brewery with Ms. Jay, my high school art teacher. She tells me I can call her by her first name now (I don’t) and discusses a public works project to repaint the downtown murals of white settlers that chip and fade on historic buildings. Later, the librarian, who’d read to me as a toddler, greets me by a name I have long since shed and in the critical moment I am too stunned to speak, so she checks books out to the ghost of me instead.

Rilke wrote in “Archaic Torso of Apollo,”  “You must change your life,” and I try to imagine myself happy; imagine myself as someone else entirely. See a future where a second puberty opens a door that, once imagined, is the only path forward. My dog says, I love all possible versions of you, there is not a you that I couldn’t love. But Rilke also wrote, “For here there is no place / that does not see you,” and I confess, it terrifies me.

In public I try to believe no one is watching, their eyes do not measure the lines of my waist or the drape of my shirt. But on the fringe of every party, I am transmogrified into freakshow. Rainier can in hand, the specters of childhood query excitedly and take their leave as soon as I satisfy their curiosity. To be seen: spectacle, circus act. Illicit enough to be irresistible, taboo beyond association. At the St. Mary’s Christmas bazaar, the librarian who checked books out to my memory can’t even look at me now, lest I shatter the fragile lens through which she views the world. To be seen and purposefully unseen: lonely poltergeist.

 

Act II

The Haircut is a part of queer coming-of-age, but I get my first Cut while dreaming. My hair stylist yelps the fateful “oops” and when she turns the chair to face the mirror there is a boy staring back at me. He is beautiful. I only recognize him by his shining eyes, whiskey-colored like mine. Of course, in my waking appointments I always leave her salon with a pixie. The first time I step into a barbershop I am twenty-two going on thirteen.

I must choose my barber carefully. My face is pimpling and a fine fuzz smudges my upper lip, but hidden behind a mask and my deepening voice I am called “sir” half the time. There are four barbershops in The Dalles and they are the kinds of places where men would sniff me out like bloodhounds. I select a barbershop in a slightly more progressive area two towns over, because they have a rainbow sticker the size of a postcard in the door that reads “You Are Welcome Here.”

I falter on the sidewalk outside as an exiting patron gives me a second look and I’m electrified by second thoughts. One week earlier my therapist told me, you just have to pretend to be brave for thirty seconds, but had declined to add, because after that you can’t turn back. I try to imagine that I belong here, swallow my heart and push open the door. I am instantly mortified by a jingling bell announcing my entry to every man in the shop. With twenty seconds to go, I avert my eyes, afraid to see faces that might justify my heart rate.

From the waiting area I pretend to scroll on my phone while evaluating my surroundings in sporadic, furtive glances. It’s a trendy place with a fridge of complimentary drinks in the corner and fetishes of masculinity covering every square inch of wall. American Classic tattoo flash, antique signs, skateboard art, and a suspended motorcycle look me over while the Commodores play in the background. When the owner finally calls my name, I cross hardwood floors and try not to fumble my way into the still-warm chair.

I chat with him in my best tenor and in my periphery the men around me put aside their suspicions. Passed over or passing, I relax into the studied comportment of masculinity. He whips the cape over me and I camouflage myself in the conversation resumed around me, laughing along as they talk about bikes, music, women—

Struggle not to stiffen, freeze my expression in a careful mask of neutrality. I am not like men and the difference gapes between us. Another barber, young, is hot-faced telling a story about ordering coffee from a bikini barista when his client makes a comment about Portland girls. You never know about Portland girls, he says, those trannies will do anything for a buck.

I am mortally aware of the softness in my shape, a smooth face, cold sweat and heat beneath. Can they smell my prey-fear? I’m not like these men, I wasn’t born with cutting teeth. The owner, hunter-sensed, hesitates behind me and I know he knows—does he know what he knows? He interjects politely, tries to steer the conversation, Everyone has to make a living. But men in their territory, unwise to the interloper, howl with laughter and flash razor incisors.

I pray they won’t find out. I’m prey. They won’t find me.

He waits a moment until, under the hum of the hairdryer, he murmurs an apology and something like a promise. When he turns the chair around I am met with a second sight: the boy from my dream is staring back, resplendent and me.

In the mirror I meet the owner’s eyes and for the first time realize, he is trying to believe I belong here too.

 

Act III

I live in a place where fundamentalists gather outside the post office near-daily. They prophesy the end of times wrought by moral turpitude, or else spout scripture as indecipherable to me as queerness is to them. Is it possible to bridge this gap? Do I want to? There is a man holding a neon yellow sign that reads “God Is Forgiving / Be Kind / Long Suffering” and I try to understand him, to puzzle what it means. Does he?

Is queerness the desire to be truly seen, or is it planning our days around the push/pull of safety/visibility? Rural freedom and rural queerdom are at odds here, like coyotes hunting hares out of wheat stubble. I did everything in my power to avoid their keen sight: commuted ninety minutes to work in the city, had my recreation in adjacent counties, relieved myself on the roadside rather than use a public restroom. For my safety, true, but I can’t help feeling the cowardice of it.

It’s a place where the words “old-school progressive” make sense. When the war in Ukraine starts, my bank account chokes on gas prices, so I leave caregiving and work locally out of a basement kitchen. The restaurant and its owners are known to me, calculated risk, I worked there before coming out. I am a year into the position when, at an employee party, the restaurant’s owner decries the conservative majority. We want you to feel safe here, she says, and what can we do to support you? In the next breath she deadnames me in front of the entire staff and laments its changing loudly, because my given name was so fitting. This is the way of progress: to endure their one hand while they pat themselves on the back with the other.

The further into transition I get, the more teachable moments smolder into tight silences.

I am tired of being their educator and show pony. One day, I correct my supervisor without coddling and she follows me down to the kitchen, apologizing tearfully all the way. When I wheel on her, we are both taken aback by my antipathy. What good does your sorry do me? I say, controlled but burning. Should I tell you it’s okay? Her white-rimmed eyes are drying. I never expected perfection, but I demand progress. I smother the thing I really want to say: When do I stop cutting myself into bite-sized pieces for you? Because I need this job, because there will always be a job that I need, because the next thing out of my mouth would be incendiary: How long do you expect me to be your pet tranny?

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It is Transgender Day of Remembrance, here it is just another day, except I wake up to several texts wondering if I’m okay. A cold fist of dread unfurls in me as I open my newsfeed to five dead after the Club Q shooting. The mortality rate of trans people in the United States is as understudied as our healthcare, but the headlines read “Life Expectancy of Black Trans Women Just 35” and “Transgender People Twice as Likely to Die.” I look at their pictures, not all of them queer, and contemplate what it is to be and be with us. Kelly Loving, 40; Derrick Rump, 38; Ashley Paugh, 35; Daniel Aston, 28; Raymond Green Vance, 22. Each name is a stone swallowed and held in the belly. I wonder if someday my parents will bury me. I am Charlie Divine, 23.

Two days after the shooting there is a secret vigil held in town, at an undisclosed location.

The meeting place isn’t announced publicly but there are few enough of us here that it is texted out a few hours before gathering. We can’t even mourn our dead without feeling the invisible scope angling at our heads. I am too afraid to attend, and stronger than the grief is the shame that strangles me.

The vigil takes place downtown, in the back room of a business that closes early. An organizer draws the curtains and connects the security system to her phone, while a team of volunteers is entrusted with the security of the front and rear of the building. People talk. My friend describes it as tense, gut-wrenching, and spicy.

How does one reconcile fear and love? Pain and duty? This place has taught me to be resilient the way only desert creatures can be. Glean sustenance from hostile environments, adapt to their heat, know when to fight and when to flee. It is important to stay, change is a weapon best wielded close range. And who will hold this ground if not us—if not me? But my rabbit-heart knows what kind of violence stalks me here—and everywhere, but here especially—where I am most conspicuous.

When, eight weeks after surgery, I am walking home from the water tower and I accidentally make eye contact with the driver of an old Tahoe, the cool finger of fear slips under my collar instantly. I wish for my dog, feel her absence and its grief welling up in me. How much would be different if she’d been with me? I am one block on when the Tahoe’s brakes scream from behind and it overshoots, skidding to a stop in front of me. A young man leans his head out the passenger side to shout something I can’t make out. I peel a headphone away from my ear cautiously and he disappears into a car full of laughter. The reverse lights flare, engine wailing, the Tahoe speeds backward, skids again. I move to put a parked car between us as the passenger door opens, a denim clad leg swinging out. As I calculate if I have the strength to fight or flee, a childlike indignance burns my throat. It’s not fair, you can’t clock me, not now. I’m wearing fucking basketball shorts. Before I have decided whether to run up the hill, toward the hospital, or down into the neighbor’s driveway, a sedan appears around the corner. The leg jerks back into the cab, the door snaps shut, hot rubber perfumes my nose as the Tahoe roars down the hill.

The sedan doesn’t even slow as it passes, I gaze at the road, black streaks on the pavement like the tails of twin comets, and I run.

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If I outlive my father, I will hike Dalles Mountain cross-country and scatter his ashes among cheat grass and rock-roses. He taught me profound tenderness: how the desert blooms in spring, how love can shake belief. There is no honor in leaving, but in my absence the hills will keep him company. I can’t change my home from the bottom of a grave, I couldn’t stay. But if I could choose my legacy, I would chew through the soft cheek of every jaw that tried me.

 

In loving memory of Presley.

 

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CHARLIE DIVINE (they/he) is a queer writer who grew up in the shrub steppe of rural Oregon. Their work is influenced by the intersection of history, art, and culture. He is a poetry reader at Chestnut Review. Find his writing in The Palouse Review, Beaver Magazine, and Vagabond City. Follow them on Instagram at @saturns.eye.

 

Featured image by Oleksandr Kurchev, courtesy of Unsplash.