The sidewalks are watching me think about you

I came out in this kitchen, years ago now, to my mom while she was looking for her jacket so I could drive her to the hospital, and then later to my dad who was patiently waiting to just eat dinner. It looked the same then as it does now, yellow walls, off-white cupboards. Stainless fridge, an oven my mom swears doesn’t get as warm as it says on the digital screen. Coffee in the cupboard, a fridge full of cold cuts and vanilla yogurt. Memories that are turned over again and again as dictated by need. It feels comforting and familiar, and then it feels different, the way all familiar things become strangers given enough time and distance.

I’m home, in Whitehorse, Yukon visiting family and traumatic memories. Lysh and I got off the plane and walked into an airport lightly populated by the people who were just on our flight, their loved ones, and no one else. When we left Toronto, we fought crowds in Pearson, but here the airport in Whitehorse–Erik Nielsen International, brother of The Naked Gun's Leslie–is only as full as it is required to be open. A woman works the counter where the rental cars are acquired, a security guy lingers by the door, away from the brief moment of hustle and bustle. No one moves quick, or slow, they just do. A pace that defines itself.

The man at the end of our row on the plane was nice and friendly and made idle chit-chat, only taking a break from reading his book about the insidious woke mob destroying a delicate moral fabric to offer us the roll from an inflight meal he wasn’t going to finish. I will wonder until I’m gone if he knew that he offered bread to the very woke he was reading in fear of, but it didn’t seem to matter too much to him or us in the moment. The woman in front of us remembered me, albeit by a different name, and I vaguely recalled her as well but couldn’t place her name. Hers was a face shared in a bar with mutual friends in a time when I spent time leaning on bars and slowly sliding my face down into oblivion. A familiarity smothered in muddy darkness. I tried to recall her name, to approach with a shared past, but she laid down on all three chairs in her row by the emergency exit, and watched The Real Housewives of Wherever on her phone at full volume with no headphones, and went to sleep for the rest of the flight.

And so I’m here now, in the shadow of memories. When I lived here, I was always chasing something, the perfect idea of a life in the wild and untamed north. Partied and thought about parties and how each one would be the answer to the questions that kept me awake and pacing in my living room, like a raven seeking food half-buried in the snow. When I lived here, I drank and fought and loved and lost, and I only left when it all became too much. I transitioned and lost my mind a little, became paranoid and wild and was jumped by my apartment downtown behind the Ford dealership, and then I left in a tornado of bitterness. I will always regret how I left, but that’s just how regrets are. Loose threads on a life that will catch and pull to remind you of the fact that this will all unravel eventually.

It’s different here now, and it is also the same. The first day we were here, I drove around downtown to see what is new here. Condos replace what were once familiar facades, old restaurants are gone and forgotten, cafés boarded over. Bars remain, bars that will live forever. I can no longer imagine walking through the door of them anymore, but they are eternal and sturdy, and they never needed me nearly as much as I needed them.

It’s not mine anymore, this home, but it’s here all the same and the sidewalks and faces remember me. People nod knowingly but struggle to remember name and pronouns, and so we just don’t say much of anything at all. The bookstore on Main Street has my book and I signed a lot more copies than I believe I can sell while a man buys cigarettes beside me. He asks for Players Light and jokes that they’re named after him, as the woman behind the counter laughs uneasily and hands me a sharpie. The bookstore is the cheapest place to buy cigarettes in Whitehorse, which is a sentence you will never write about any other town but this one. When you could still smoke inside, I would often sneak away from the bar to buy a pack and a pack of matches, maybe flip through some magazines too, before returning to the table for another round of the cheapest beer on the menu. The faces in this town I don’t recognize would never know to buy their cigarettes at the bookstore because they don’t smoke or because they don’t have a shared history of self-destructive yearning, and it's both to their loss and great benefit that they don’t know.

Instead of wandering the streets with a pack of cheap cigarettes in my pocket, we lie low, have dinner and go for walks in the woods and fall asleep before 10 PM. Lysh and I are tired more than we’re awake, and it's only on Friday night that my body starts to itch in all the places that once so desperately needed something, from the streets that lead across the bridge downtown to all the doors that opened for cheap beer and cheap cigarettes. I don’t scratch anymore, not like I used to, and it's been long enough now that I can let it pass as I climb into bed and turn the lights low. The itch subsides, my phone lights up with surprised notes that I’m in town and loose plans are made for coffee, to catch-up, that might never fully unravel, but that’s just how plans are.

Shameless self promotion

You might not know I run a small indie press with my friend Tuck Woodstock, called Girl Dad Press. You should know that you can pre-order the follow-up to our Lambda Award-winning anthology, 2 Trans 2 Furious. It’s called Sex Change and the City, it’s all queer and trans writers and artists creating in the name of SATC. Get it here.

I was a guest on the excellent podcast This Ends at Prom to discuss the beautiful and fantastic film Can’t Hardly Wait, a movie I had no seen since I could rent it on VHS from the video store up the street from my parents house that is slated to be demolished and turned into condos. Listen here.