girls
Around Pride 2024, I started to experience a crash. I had promised myself a year of psychotic behaviour following the most substantive, real breakup of my life the November prior, and I was about three-quarters of the way through. I’d been dating a million people and partying at least two weekends out of the month and generally indulging in mess.
By July, I’d had a dozen micro-breakups with random dudes and I was getting fatigued by going through the motions of meeting new people and establishing whether we were incompatible enough that our connection would remain comfortably superficial but not so annoying that it would be a net-negative to incorporate them into the roster. I’d done a decent job of containing the partygirl antics to the weekends, but the chemicals were racking up in my system and I was starting to spend the rest of the week drudging through a fog of malaise.
Pride weekend especially set it off. After a night out dancing for a girlfriend’s birthday, we absconded to an afters at the bottle depot, catching a ride from a sexy French boy I vaguely knew from the scene who was definitely way too on-one to be driving. After half an hour or so at the party, a gorgeous blonde girl caught his eye and he drifted off in her direction. As was typically the case when I actually liked someone, I’d been playing it very cool and coy with him and maintaining a distance through the evening, so I couldn’t exactly blame him for gravitating towards someone more expressive and assured in signalling her interest. All the same, though, I was miffed, so I texted Ricky instead.
Ricky was a frenetic, strange little man who buzzed around my apartment like a wasp. He came with a fresh bag of coke and about 15 disparate trains of thought that he tried to communicate all at once. We’d been chatting on and off for weeks but it was our first time actually meeting. Luckily, he was cuter in person but he had an overpowering presence and a chaotic edge that was a bit frightening. At one point, he rattled off my phone number that he had inexplicably memorized, and he made cryptic reference to knowing people that “had eyes on me”. He spilled a whole glass of water on my bed and didn’t leave until I dragged him out at 10am, threatening to come back later that night.
I left the Pride festival in the early afternoon and walked straight to Banfield Park on the Gorge, my favourite spot in the city. I stashed all of my stuff behind a tree, undressed to my underwear and dove into the water, hoping that it would cleanse me of my sins and inoculate me against what was sure to be a rough upcoming week.
As predicted, my brain was grinding and shooting sparks by the time I clocked into work the next day. It was becoming increasingly clear that my year of prescribed chaos was starting to catch up with me. I’d bent my life in service to my every impulse, chopping off all of my hair and getting a bunch of new tattoos and spending all my time responding to messages on dating apps. The week before, I impulsively treated Dov, my favourite boyfriend, to a $400 dinner with caviar and bottles of wine. In one particularly melodramatic and bird-brained exchange, I remarked to Brigid, “The world is burning, so we might as well dance in the ashes”, and she laughed in my face as I packed a bowl.
That said, and in fairness, it was also the most fun I’d had in ages, especially compared to the suffocating final months of my relationship. I was more successful than I’d ever been professionally, recently securing a substantial five figure raise. Even more than the time I was wasting on random guys, I was pouring a lot of energy and effort into rekindling friendships and building new ones. In the fall, I had met two girlies who would come to be some of my dearest, most treasured sisters to this day. Even my family relationships were better than ever - I had recently joined them for a vacation in the Palm Desert for the first time in years and roadtripped to LA with my sister and her husband.
The lion’s share of the fatigue I felt was from the effort required to balance these competing spheres of my life. In every case except my closest, most connected friendships, everyone I interacted with received a facsimile, only getting access to what would smooth our exchange and maintain the most useful image of me for the context. At work, I was informed and confident but flexible, never wanting to come across as overly assertive or commanding. With guys, I was chipper and nonchalant, never wanting to signal that I might want something more than they were offering or - god forbid - that I might be more interested in them than they were in me.
Even in nightlife there was a degree of control. The parties my friends and I favoured weren’t explicitly queer and, while we were popular and enjoyed perks like guestlist and free drinks, we were also aware that our acceptance was conditional. We could be friendly and playful, but rarely signal overt interest in someone. We could move to the center of the dance floor but only if we were careful to excuse ourselves and smile disarmingly at everyone we slid past. Essentially, we were aware of our jesters’ privilege and behaved accordingly.
I had long since accepted that, to successfully move through spaces as a trans woman, you need to simultaneously de-sex yourself while also presenting and conducting yourself in a sexually appealing manner. You can blush and flirt, but never assert. You should show your legs and curves but modestly - dressing in an intentionally provocative manner marks you as someone with an inappropriate, overly sexualized view of femininity at best and a scary dude with a fetish at worst. You should entertain the attention of men but never explicitly acknowledge it, and you should align yourself with women but never hint at more than a superficial commonality with them. You should be pliant and agreeable and patient and understanding, and you should never make anyone feel bad for saying something that makes you feel uncomfortable or objectified or like a sinister Buffalo Bill caricature.
Even over the last nine months of chaotic hedonism, I always filtered every new scenario through this lens of maintaining at least some level of composure and control over how I was being perceived in the space. The small handful of times that I blacked out haunted me, worrying me that I’d done something impulsive or uncontrolled that could paint me with a negative brush and mark me as a true Other as opposed to an exception. The psychic load of balancing this imperative with the impulse to be as indulgent and lawless as possible was what really dragged me down, though the complete depletion of serotonin certainly wasn’t helping.
I had an upcoming trip to Serbia to contend with as well, and had next to no insight as to how safely I’d navigate my time there. It didn’t help that my parents were convinced that I’d be hauled off to some torture dungeon like Bijou Phillips in Hostel Part II, my mom especially peppering me with questions about what security measures I was planning.
It was frustrating that the time in my life where I felt most assured, most free and most confident in my ability to take on challenges and navigate through hardship also meant naturally that I was finding myself in increasingly unknown situations that required new layers of mental calculus. For the first time, I was being approached by hetero dudes at the club and never knew exactly where the intangible threshold was that would push them towards dismissal or aggression. I was invited through work to attend conferences and events in random, smaller towns throughout BC and always wondered how people would react to me, and what decisions I should make regarding my manner of dress, or if it was safe to walk around at night. I could be firm with some family members about how they referred to me, but only to an extent and always couched in a profuse acknowledgement of how challenging it must be for them.
In the private, darkest corners of my brain, I held a simmering, low level of resentment for most people in my orbit, even the ones I was otherwise fond of, because of how I perceived their ability to bumble into social situations without having to anticipate and preempt everyone from thinking they were an unkempt invalid or a delusional charity case or a potential sexual predator.
The weeks following Pride were a low point of the year. I had put too many eggs in a few baskets with regards to dating, being disappointed by a lack of follow-through from two guys in particular and I was starting to freak out a bit about being able to afford my upcoming trip around Europe. I spent a few days locked up in my apartment like Lady Macbeth, wringing my hands and wailing softly, draping myself languidly across the couch.
Luckily, I had a long weekend on the books to go to Seattle to see Audrey, a dear friend who was more like a sister. We had met over 10 years earlier on Tumblr of all places, getting to the point where we chatted every day, generally all through the day. I’d been regularly going down to see her in Olympia and later Seattle since 2015, and made a point of going at least once a year in the summer. Over the past two years or so, she’d started working in nightlife in Capitol Hill, and had a fun, crazy, super cute crew of trans girls who liked to party and live it up.
My upcoming trip overseas would be my first time travelling somewhere truly solo, as I had stops planned in Glasgow and Berlin where I didn’t know a single person. When I went to LA in the spring, I’d challenged myself to go out to a few bars alone and strike up conversation with people to get myself used to navigating those spaces without the cushion of an existing network to fall back on. This visit to Seattle would be my last chance at it before I jetted off in August, so I went into it with the intention of taking a few social risks and seeing what happened.
I hopped on the Clipper on Thursday, making it to Seattle in the late afternoon. I dropped off my bags at Audrey’s apartment and we walked over to Cal Anderson Park to eat ice cream and lounge in the sun before she had to work that night. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, so we caught each other up on life, me telling her about all the boys and braindead antics and her sharing about her boyfriend and the complicated interpersonal dynamics at the two clubs where she worked. We had both been feeling stressed and a bit down, so we solemnly committed to having a super whacky weekend to shake it all off.
That night she was working at Massive, so I tagged along. Her friend Mina was working the bar and kept me furnished with free drinks. It was still early so the club was empty, and I busied myself chatting with Mina and swiping on Tinder. After a while, two girls showed up and sat a few stools away. In keeping with my vow, I sidled over to them and struck up a conversation, complimenting them on their outfits. It occurred to me that I would realistically never see them again, so it didn’t really matter what kind of impression I made, allowing me to relax the usual undercurrent of mental calculations at play. We connected easily and chatted for an hour or so before they drifted upstairs to dance. I looked back at my phone and saw that I had matched with Harlow, a salty morsel with stretched ears and face tattoos.
It turned out that he was working security at a bar just a few blocks away, and he told me to come by, saying that he’d cover my tab if I kept him company for a bit. Emboldened by a sip or two of vodka soda, I wandered over to find him leaning against the wall near the door. He was even more handsome in person.
I walked up and threw my arms around him, feeling his beefy chest and shoulders. He seemed just as pleased to see me as I was to see him, and we lapsed seamlessly into conversation. He gave me his chair and put his jacket around my shoulders, asking what I wanted from the bar and going in to get it for me. Just like with the girls earlier, I was curious to see how this interaction could play out if I just threw caution to the wind and didn’t attempt to mediate or water down the impression I gave.
He was hitting a vape as we chatted and asked if I wanted some. Normally, I had no interest in them and would only take a puff of someone’s as a last resort but I saw it as an opportunity to stress-test the normal boundaries I put around interactions with guys. I told him to hold it up to my lips for me and he did, flushing slightly and grinning. We chatted for an hour or so, and he dutifully replenished my drink without being asked and kept offering up hits of his vape. I knew that Audrey would be done doing prep work in the back and she’d be upstairs working the bar by now, so I told him that I should get back to the club. He asked if he could see me later, after his shift, and I smiled and said, “We’ll see.”
As I was about to stand, he said, “Wait, your shoelace is untied.” I looked down and so it was. I looked back up at him and raised my eyebrow, tilting my foot towards him. Again, he flushed and bent down to tie it for me. Stifling a laugh, I took off up the street back towards the club.
Upstairs, I found the same two girls and we danced together all night, laughing at the goofy Taylor Swift remixes the Thursday night DJ was playing. I’d peel away occasionally to chat with Audrey at the bar, and told her that I’d probably hang out with Harlow that night. I showed her a picture of him and she scoffed and rolled her eyes. He was essentially the prototype of the kind of guy I was into.
I wasn’t ready to stop dancing by the time his shift was over, but ended up catching an Uber back to his around last call. He came out to meet me, leading me by the hand into his room. By now, it was super late and I’d been drinking for hours, so I bypassed the awkwardness of negotiating what would happen next and said we should just watch a movie and get some sleep and see what was up in the morning. I fell asleep with my head on his chest.
The next morning, my insides felt oily and gross from hitting his vape so much the night before. I excused myself for a ladylike upchuck in his restroom, giggling and introducing myself to his room mate as I sauntered past her. He seemed undeterred by my wartorn state, and we kissed in his bed and watched videos of some live performances. The Capitol Hill Block Party was that weekend and Chappell Roan was performing at the height of her unexpected mania, so everyone was abuzz.
He took me out for breakfast and then we hung out in the garden behind his apartment building. He rolled a few joints for us and I sat in his lap, intermittently kissing him and taking long drags as he held them to my lips. He hinted that we might hang out again that weekend but I knew that we’d be going out with Audrey’s friends that night and probably wouldn’t be home until after sunrise so all I could do was laugh and say, “Maybe”.
Audrey wanted to go to the beach with Mina and her other friend Serena. I made out with Harlow for a few more minutes in the sun and then he ordered a car for me back to Capitol Hill. Despite still feeling queasy, I smiled to myself on the drive back, satisfied with the success of this caper and taking it as a sign for the weekend to come.
The girls made fun of me coming back disheveled in my clothes from the night before and I quickly freshened up as best as I could. We popped in to the grocery store to grab some snacks and then set off on a chaotic Lime scooter journey through Capitol Hill, whizzing through intersections and dodging around pedestrians as I held on for dear life. By some miracle, I made it without busting out my teeth and we arrived at what I quickly found out was a nude beach on the shore of Lake Washington.
We staked out a spot under a huge, shady tree and Mina and Serena stripped down. I hadn’t publicly shown more of my body than my legs and stomach in years but it was sunny and hot and it felt comfortable being there with the other girls, so I took off my top. We lounged on the beach for hours, smoking joints and drinking White Claws. Serena especially had an unpredictable, irreverent energy and she had us dying of laughter all afternoon. Any time someone looked over at us, we smiled and waved, taunting them to say something if they dared.
We agreed that we’d go out to Kremwerk, a sketchy, whacky club where they all worked and then maybe to a greasy-seeming “Florida-themed” party at The Cuff that night. Serena texted Stacy, another of their partygirl friends who said we could come over later and she’d drive us to her connect in Ballard before we went out.
We stopped in at a restaurant called Fat’s on our way home and had a super cute little family dinner of shrimp and grits with fried chicken and waffles. I knew it would be the only thing we’d eat until the next afternoon, so I tucked in, drinking as much water as I could handle.
After a brief disco nap and a few hours listening to music and getting ready, we walked over to Stacy’s place downtown. We hung out in her apartment while she put the finishing touches on her look, mixing a few pre-drinks to hype up. She drove us over to Ballard to grab some bags, getting a gram for each of us. Serena looked around gravely and said, “I want these empty by the end of the night, girls.”
As it turned out, Kremwerk was a bit vibeless that night. We wandered the confusing network of hallways and rooms, taking little scoops along the way per Serena’s directive. After sticking it out for about an hour, we wandered over to The Cuff, realizing quite quickly that this is where everybody was congregated. The party spilled out onto the street, the sticky, humid summer heat laying a film over everyone.
We pushed our way in, dodging past the person working the door and scurrying down the stairs into the club. It was packed shoulder to shoulder, the crowd made up almost entirely of gay men who weren’t particularly thrilled to have a gaggle of girls descend upon them. We tried dancing for a while but the gays were ruthless, literally shoving and elbowing us out of the way. Already kundled, I couldn’t match the pace and we retreated to a side bar under a covered patio. This was where I gained further insight into what it meant for a party to be Florida-themed.
The crowd was circled around a few more girls who were drenched in sweat and stripped down to their underwear, absolutely smoking the boys in a twerking contest while an announcer shouted excitedly into the mic. A girl that Audrey knew from the nightlife scene was all the way down on the floor, athletically shaking her ass like her life depended on it. She was crowned the obvious winner and waved to the crowd like Princess Diana. They handed her a $100 bill with the fanfare of an Olympic medal and she marched straight to the bar and ordered 10 shots, downing half of them in less than a minute. Audrey looked at me and wisely said, “We don’t need those tonight, baby” and we congratulated her friend, the reigning champion of the evening.
There was another, smaller crowd just on the other side of the bar. We pushed through and saw, improbably, a man standing there with a large Tupperware storage bin full of snakes writhing around in a shifting mass. He reached in and pulled a few out, draping them on our arms and shoulders. Had I been sober, I would’ve been horrified and repulsed, but I took it in stride as another moment ramping up the idiocy of the night, posing for a picture as the snake wound around my neck. I asked him if it was stressful for the snakes to be in a club and he replied that they can’t really hear. I wasn’t so sure this was right, and it wasn’t exactly what I’d asked but I laughed all the same and thanked him for the bizarre experience.
A few more scoops in, we finally made some space on the dance floor, making the group decision to just start shoving the boys right back. I’d taken enough that it was starting to have a psychedelic effect, and the lights flashing into the mirrors gave the impression that we had teleported into some interdimensional space maze. Closing my eyes didn’t make me feel any more connected to reality, so I leaned in to the insanity of it all, dispensing with the idea that I needed to specifically know or care where we were. Stacy had climbed up on stage and was hanging bodily from some scaffolding, wildly bucking her head back and forth. She looked like King Kong scaling the Empire State Building. I stared at her dumbly, laughing in disbelief. I learned later that her antics got her turfed from the club, but I wasn’t present enough to register her absence.
We danced idiotically, letting the pulse of the chemicals dictate our movements. A tall, buff, dopey-looking guy danced up on me, saying that it was rare for him to meet someone the same height. I regarded him blithely and didn’t respond but he was cute enough that I didn’t cast him away. He grabbed my waist and pulled me in tight against him, saying, “It doesn’t matter because I’m gay”, before grabbing my boobs and making out with me. His tongue was clammy and he tasted like cheap beer but it was enough sensation that it brought me back to Earth, so I went along with it. We carried on like that for a few minutes and then the guy he had obviously arrived with angrily grabbed him and pulled him away. I threw my head back and laughed, and then I phased back into a different dimension.
If pressed, I’d have no way of saying how long we were at the club, nor would I be able to describe the physical space in any detail. I remember as we left, I was surprised by how steep and long the stairs were back up to ground level, and I was retroactively impressed that we had managed to descend them without incident.
The night was still hot and we were amped and sweaty from dancing. We walked back to the park, laying on the grass and looking up at the stars. Stacy had met back up with us, and she continued to energetically dig into her bag, taking bumps in rapid succession. As we watched, she seemed to lapse out of reality entirely, frozen with her mouth gaping open and her head tilted back as though in a silent scream. She looked like a Tim Burton puppet mid-animation. I asked if she was okay and the girls all laughed and said this was her party trick.
After an hour or so, Stacy had regained enough of her faculties for us to walk her home. We got her tucked into bed and then started the trek up Capitol Hill just as the sun started to peek over the horizon. Serena brought us down a specific street on the way and had us stand under a tree, explaining that the flowers on the branches were magnolia blossoms, which held their fragrance only for a short time. Gently, she pulled one of the branches towards us and we inhaled the delicate perfume. She told us this was her favourite time of year, and she always looked forward to the few days in summer when the blossoms were at their most fragrant.
As we watched the sun come up, she looked at us and said, “How lucky are we that we get to live our lives like this?” We laughed, but she insisted, “No, seriously - we get to have so much fun and be crazy and take in all these beautiful moments. We should be grateful.” It seemed a bit silly because we had spent the whole night acting like absolute demons. I knew, though, that what she really meant was that we were fortunate as trans women to get to be silly and indulgent, to spend the day lounging at a nude beach and then drifting around from club to club without incident - to have found each other and be able to keep each other safe. We breathed in the scent of the blossoms once more and continued on our way.
Audrey crashed at her boyfriend’s that night so I had her apartment to myself. As I was finally getting ready for bed, I got a text from Dylan, another of my girlies down in Portland and one of the craziest people I know. She FaceTimed me, walking down the street completely naked on her way home from a rave.
“Babe, oh my god. What are you doing?”
“What?”, she said, “It’s hot.”
Normally I would have said something scolding and big-sisterly, but I recalled that the other girls and I had also laid out nude just the day before, so I just laughed and told her she was nuts.
We exchanged notes on our antics and I sat on the call with her for a few minutes to make sure she got home safe.
After crashing for a few hours, I met back up with Audrey and we laid out a blanket between the reservoir and the observatory in Volunteer Park, soaking up the sun. Giving each other furtive, daring looks, we simultaneously produced our respective bags and took a few more keys, laughing at the perverse decadence of it all, like we were characters in a John Waters movie.
We spent a few hours lazing there, reminiscing about some of our previous misadventures and making each other cry with laughter. She had a few years on me in terms of transition and she leaned a lot more classically femme than me but we had come up in quite similar ways and shared a lot of thoughts and experiences, especially since re-emerging back into society after COVID and adjusting to the new ways people perceived us.
Despite our brains being nuked from the night before and the bumps we had taken earlier, we had a surprisingly earnest and vulnerable conversation about contending with the assumptions that people projected onto us. I shared with her about the pressure I felt to constantly de-sex myself equally in hetero and queer spaces to stave off even the hint of a suggestion that I might be a sexual aggressor or a weirdo fetishist. We talked about being pigeon-holed in professional and social situations and having to balance the competing impulses of others to class us simultaneously as domineering and assertive and also histrionic and frivolous, and how the only palatable option seemed to be restricting ourselves to the most base-line, even-keeled emotional non-response in any situation, regardless of how it actually impacted us.
We chatted for a while longer but Audrey had to go to work and I was due to meet up with Amber, another internet friend that I had connected with about a year and a half earlier and met in person just once before. I wandered my way through the neighbourhood, taking a few wrong turns in my still-addled state but managed to meet up with her at a Mexican spot on the corner where we giggled over spicy margs.
Though she was still a fairly new friend, Amber had quickly become one of my closest sisters. She was brash and irreverent, extremely clever and a bullwhip in conversation. She was a fair bit more reserved than me in terms of going out, but I had a feeling that I could work a little magic on her this evening.
We had a few drinks and flirted with the bartenders and then took off back to Cal Anderson Park, apparently the vortex of my misbehaviour this weekend. Today was the day that Chappell Roan was performing, so the entire neighbourhood was absolutely slammed with girls in pink cowboy hats buzzing with excitement.
It was my last night in Seattle and I obviously wouldn’t be able to bring the goods I had procured back home with me so Amber and I found a spot on a sunny bench and took a few scoops, laughing at the brazen stupidity of it all. We each opened up the apps and set about casting a net for some chaos to find for the night.
As it happened, Dee was also down in the city for the weekend. She was a not-quite-out trans girl from Vancouver that I’d met online in the early spring and gone on a few dates with, but had more recently taken under my wing as her situation became more apparent. She was shopping nearby in the city centre.
Dee was a bit older and not quite as prone to madness, so I suspected that I could recruit her to be our keeper for the evening, giving Amber and I the opportunity to come totally unglued. Bless her heart, she agreed, and she came to the park to meet up with us.
We ended up at Pony, a funny little grimy bar with vintage porn wheatpasted on the walls and a gloryhole in the bathroom. We spent the evening sipping vodka sodas and taking poppers from the gay boys at the table next to us, with Amber and I frequently sneaking off to the stall. As was the theme of the weekend, we styled ourselves as the celebrities in residence. Amber and I stalked around the bar arm-in-arm, waving and smiling beneficently at everyone in attendance like we were royals on tour. We invited ourselves into conversations, throwing our heads back to laugh at our own jokes and coyly placing our hands on guys’ chests and shoulders to emphasize our proclamations. It was not the type of bar where people danced but we did anyway, wondering if we had the wherewithal to get up on the go-go platform. In essence, we inflicted ourselves on everyone there.
After a few hours we relented, fleeing gleefully into the night. As Amber searched up her way home, I heard a voice from behind me say, “Oh my god.”
I turned around to see a woman staring up at me in awe. “You are so beautiful,” she declared.
“Aw, thank you baby.”
“No, I mean it. You are gorgeous.”
She had long red hair and cute freckles, a pretty face and a hot, curvaceous body. I turned to wink at Amber and Dee like “Watch this” and soon she and I were kissing, leaned up against the window of the bar.
After a few moments, I felt a crushing force close around my throat, crushing my windpipe. I looked down and saw that her arm was outstretched rigidly and she was strangling me, looking like Darth Vader using the Force. With some effort, I managed to pry her fingers away from my neck and said, “Girl, what the fuck?”
She blushed with embarrassment and responded, “Sorry. It was Chappell”, as though she had been possessed. I laughed with shock and amazement, and Amber, Dee and I ran off up the street before she became activated again.
Once we saw Amber off on the bus, Dee took me to Dick’s, a late night retro drive-in diner. We got burgers and fries and huckleberry ice cream cones and perched up on a windowsill nearby to eat them. It was one of the first times she’d had a night out with other trans women, and we chatted about the path ahead for her. I was nearly sober for the first time in three days and we had a heartfelt conversation about our dating woes and the importance of sisterhood.
Even though it was nearly 3am, it was still balmy and warm out. I walked back the long way, listening to Blondie and savouring this last night before I went home to real life.
The next morning, Audrey and I went for brunch with her boyfriend. I hadn’t met him before and I apologized that his first impression of me was after I had been essentially microwaved for days on end. He was sweet and disarming, though, and the three of us laughed and chatted animatedly, talking about my upcoming trip and their plans for the rest of the summer. I hugged Audrey goodbye and made my way to the ferry home.
On the journey back, I smiled to myself, reflecting on how chaotic and fun the weekend had been. We had pushed the limits of substance use to the point of breaking, even for me. That said, it had also been surprisingly wholesome at times, and replenishing to have had so much time with my sisters.
After spending so long straining under the effort to maintain a palatable image in my various social spheres back home, it had been cathartic and - dramatic as it sounds - healing to allow myself to relax entirely and be unreservedly stupid and sexy and silly and weird.
That day by the reservoir, Audrey and I had discussed how there are entire segments of society that are dedicated to interpreting all of our motivations and actions through the most negative, suspicious lens regardless of how much we exert ourselves to appear benign and composed. I’d experienced a nihilistic zen from leaning into this for the weekend, allowing myself to give in to impulse and abandon instead of filtering every output through a desire to be interpreted as one of The Good Ones.
I’d lived in Victoria long enough to know that most social environments were too buttoned-up and precious to get away with how demonic I’d been that weekend but my spirit had been rejuvenated by this trip, allowing the presence of the other girls to steel me into something more impervious and bold. Even though my brain felt like someone had taken a melon-baller to it, I was happier and more at peace than I’d been in months.
The afterglow carried me through the rest of the summer, and I drew on the devil-may-care approach I’d taken that weekend as I travelled around Europe a few weeks later, not knowing that it would set off a chain of events that would lead to me moving abroad. I relocated to Glasgow almost exactly a year after that trip to Seattle.
Relative to most, I’ve been uncommonly blessed to be surrounded in community with trans women, acting for each other simultaneously as mother, sister, daughter and best friend. We shore each other up and offer understanding and affirmation at times when it feels like the world is committed to misinterpreting and discarding us. These relationships, even when we’re being frivolous and stupid, contain a gravity built from communal sight and an ability to intuitively perceive and hold one another, to slip through the imperceptible cracks in the otherwise ever-present mask. We allow one another to exhale.
This weekend especially had taken on a dream-like quality, like waking up in Narnia. Though I’d dedicated the past year to indulgence, experimentation and abandon, it all had occurred while still slogging through the mire of assumption and projection. The project of simultaneously portraying a composed partygirl, an easy-breezy Samantha Jones and an effortless business woman had been successful but unfulfilling. It wasn’t until now that I realized that going to great lengths to appear nonchalant is a losing game from the start.
These few days in Girl World were the incubatory stages of recognizing an impetus to embrace authenticity - something I’d spent the last twenty years sprinting away from as a once-necessary but now self-defeating attempt at cobbling together scraps of safety and control. The constant distance and composure had served to conduct me to this point, but kept me far from immediacy and potency, every experience processed through invisible autonomic processes that filtered my response.
Standing underneath the magnolia tree and breathing in the fragrance of the flowers had been one of the first moments in years where the world occurred to me instantly, without interpretation or mediation. As we watched the sun rise that morning, I started to allow myself to imagine a world where I could take life on the front of the tongue.
A year later, when I landed in my new home, I immediately set about meeting trans women, going for coffee with one of my now-closest friends a few days after arriving. We sat on a picnic table and shared a slice of orange olive oil cake. I remember exactly how it tasted.