To Be Home, to Be Afar, to Be Afraid
by Len Luminosity
I am not making my ten year plan realistically.
I am making my ten year plan based on the idea–the hope, really–that I will be legally alive and allowed to be transgender in this country in ten years. It’s awful nice to be optimistic and all, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe I should look a little more intently outside of here. A cheap education degree isn’t much use if I’m tortured into inability to use it.
Sometimes I think maybe I avoid finding somewhere else because of laziness. It’s just too much work, just too much “what if” to make a plan without more spreadsheets than I have hours.
But then I think about it more.
And I remember the ring my grand aunt gave me, Watertown High School, 1936. The town right over from me, where that aunt lives and will be buried, where we ate dinner tonight, within walking distance from my own childhood homes. The ring was my great grandfather’s, 10k gold bought during a time where it’s suspicious that he could.
My dad’s side of the family has been in this country for seven odd generations. One of them was on the Mayflower, I think. They are so New England it hurts. You can hear it in how my grandmother asks “whe’e my khakis?”, how she once told the waiter that she still needs “a fock an’ watah!”. My dad’s sister also had a Boston accent once upon a time, but she trained herself out of it, couldn’t face the bullying. I’m not sure what the other kids found so funny. It makes me a bit sad to hear how generalized her words are pronounced. I didn’t know you could Americanize an American accent, but I witness it in real time when she “parks the car in the garage”.
Though I can’t act like I don’t have my own assimilations, regardless of my choice of reasoning versus circumstance.
“My cousins are simple, horse-riding cattle ranch Americans…”
My lips curl up as I tell the story, curving like the church pews I’ve so neglectfully visited. This is the kind of gossip I would imagine echoes underneath His name, unfriendly neighbors hushing reminders not to disturb the sermon. Truth is, they just don’t like that the town is finding out what their son got up to last week. I mean–I would imagine that’s how that all works. I guess I wouldn’t know.
“There were two boys, both named Shannon Brown–the younger one of them got branded at a party. The cowboys took out the cattle rod…”
Around me, I see a delight in the unknown, faces lit up by the curiosity of hearing such a Western story descended by your fellow New Englander. I can tell by the way they tip forwards just a bit, question forming with body language, that they think of me as an accurate source to a mystifying culture. It makes me feel a bit like I am perverting something pure, stealing an innocence. I’ve really only been to one rodeo. Ultimately, for all I tell about great prairie plains and the vast geometry of Wyoming and Colorado, I am a guest to my own culture. It’s something really only I and my family know this certainly.
One day, I think I would like to move out west. Sure, I’ll be in Massachusetts the next ten years, but I’ll live far longer than another ten measly years. Maybe I’ll go to Colorado, see Fort Morgan, P.A. Poe Produce. That was my great grandfather. The ‘P.A.’ stood for ‘Pearl Allen’, though he never went by his first name because he thought it was too feminine. Everyone I’ve talked to is disappointed that he didn’t. I guess maybe the lack of sacrificial lambs I have given to a gender role-obsessed God is just another imposter of mine.
I could visit Wyoming on weekends, just an hour and a half drive up to capital Cheyenne. Add an extra hour if I care to visit Laramie, gallop around where my mother was raised. Take a tour of the calves, the galloping antelope. Take myself back to where I lived before I was born, before I was conceived.
Maybe then I’ll be a cattle rancher by honor, Western as christened by filtered rain water from the Rockies and not just as paperworked by the milky blood of the womb.
Again, this is all assuming I won’t have to abandon every part of the United States. I would like to think I can stay and love this country with resilience and thorough redesigning, but I would rather live free elsewhere than die in someany way here. It’s just the way it goes–abandoning my ethnic culture for my sexual culture. Not the first time for me nor for the other miscellaneous whites, I guess–recall the premarital? There’s been a lot of that.
I suppose this feels different though. It’s not just a throwaway pursuit of a pleasure that only interrupts a tradition that I was never going to care about, it’s a permanent vacancy from the lands that I’ve always called home and would always like to call home. And my reasons make sense–I want to use the bathroom without being beaten, to take off my shirt without being disgraced, to announce myself without being violated–but they hurt nonetheless. My family is not of this culture. Neither end of my American spectrum has hyperpop emanating from rodeo microphones or burlesque performances playing on pub televisions. They may know the feeling stirred in them by those giant windmills and that dirty harbor, but the they do not know the ascension of cropped-top unison in purple-lit bathrooms, the solidarity of a vulgar shirt with a little too much information about the wearer’s genitals. And it hurts a bit that I place this family-foreign safety over the way the reddening foliage brings me home.
I think I have a lot of my mother in me. My father’s Massachusetts upbringing absorbs into the way I talk about Boston, but I feel something rise in me when I hear freak folk sing “I’m built to die in the midwest”, taking out the ‘mid’ for ‘American’, maybe adding a ‘great’ beforehand if I really feel like driving the point home.
Because I really do think I will die in this country, for better or for worse. All I want, I can entertain nightmares–disguised as dreamily-spoken goals, of course–of packing my bags to teach English somewhere I don’t know, but it won’t change that simple fact.
I am going to die in the United States of America.
By fascism, by age, by my own hands, by the violence of another, by almost comedically unexpected turn of events, by disease, by drug, by peacefulness, by force, by accident, by reason, by any cause. It does not matter. I say my minimum age of death is seventy, but that is the fact of the deal I have made with god. The pact my woefully unexercised heritage has bound me in says that, when I finally pass, it will be somewhere within these beautiful, cursed 3.5 million square miles.