How do you know when it’s the last good day?
At least two people, totally independently of each other, have made me think about the question of how, or even if, you can know when it’s the last good day. One of them was my husband, Dylan; the other was a good friend, Waverly, who wrote an entire story about that question. You can read it here. It made me feel like a teenager turning my face up to the rain for the sheer novelty and luxury of it.
This morning Dylan and I drove out to the hospital where we pick up our prescriptions. We’re both trans men, which means that a significant and non-negotiable element of our existence depends on supply chains in a way that is more obvious for us than it is for most. As we pulled up to the parking lot, we noticed caution tape blocking the quick drop-off lane, and when we got out of the car, one of the pharmacy techs we regularly see indicated through the hospital’s glass frontage that we should walk down to the emergency entrance rather than waste our time at the main doors, which were closed. When we did get into the building, the automatic doors opened accompanied by an equally automated rush of cold air: positive pressure measures, perhaps, though I can’t be sure. At the front desk, we filled out and signed forms confirming that we were not in contact with anyone tested positive for COVID-19 and did not have any symptoms ourselves. We saw at most five other people in the entire building. While we were waiting for the pharmacist to bring up our prescriptions, an armed guard walked in to talk to her. She spent the entire time on speakerphone hold with the IRS. That was the oddest part of the whole experience.
In Cleveland, at least, it’s beautiful outside today — sunny and unseasonably warm. We closed the salon, as I expected, so a few hours after we stopped by the pharmacy Dylan and I went in to take out the trash and put up a sign for our clients. I write about the salon as if you should already know what I’m talking about because it’s such a singular place. You can probably figure out where it is if you try; I won’t be naming it here because my coworkers did not sign up to get posted about, and several of them don’t have Twitter. Their lives are free of a kind of chaos they may not even know exists, and I have no interest in ruining that for them. In any case, there is a certain meditative calm in putting a place to rest for the moment: unplugging devices, making sure all the lights are off, putting a sign on the door telling our clients to take care of themselves and each other until we can see them again.
The last good day, I think, has come and gone. I suspect it was yesterday. I thought this last night, watching the sun set crimson through the trees as we drove home, watching taillights ahead of us. These are the ghosts of a time already gone, afterimages of what used to be. I am glad I got to see that sunset; I’m glad I got to spend time with my friends and chosen family while I still had the option, given that I don’t think we’ll be able to do that again for a while. I’m glad I got to get married with many of my friends present. I will cherish those memories, turning them over and over until they become polished with wear, glimmering little cabochons to keep beneath my tongue. There is a particular kind of almost enjoyable sadness I feel when I know that things are good right now and that means they will not be good again for a long time. It is piercing.
There were several months between the day that I knew I was trans and the day that I told my parents. I didn’t spend a lot of time with them during that period, because it was becoming increasingly difficult to listen to them using my deadname and the wrong pronouns — not because it caused me great discomfort (though it would later) but because it did not cause me any, and thus made me doubt myself. My parents spent the later years of my adolescence and the early years of my adulthood addressing me without knowing or wanting to know me, in essence talking past me to a person who I was not, so I was used to answering to the wrong identifiers. I had the opposite difficulty with my husband. Anything he called me felt right, because he knew me from the moment that we met, on a Monday in May unlike any that we will probably see for a long time to come. He picked me up at the airport and I thought immediately, Oh, of course, it’s you. We drove on a whim for two hours to a flea market so packed that people had left their cars on the side of the road, parked on 45-degree hills, and we talked as though we’d known each other all our lives. We went back to that same flea market last year, now engaged and both out as trans, and spent only fifteen minutes there before the staring became too nerve-wracking to bear. This year, as of a few days ago, Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine (R) has banned gatherings of 100 or more people.
In those odd in-between months when I knew that I would have to come out to my parents and that it would end our relationship, but they had no idea, I found myself enjoying the time we spent together, even when it felt like seeing double, even when trying not to start an argument over dinner in the one-bedroom apartment where I grew up made me immediately into a child again. I have a coworker who used to work at a nursing home on the dementia ward, and she told me once that their protocol with those residents more removed from reality was that first you would try to bring them into your world, the real world, and if that failed, then you would follow them into theirs. Being at home with my parents, surrounded by the books I escaped into as a child and the bathroom I hid in because it had the only door with a lock in the whole apartment, I slipped immediately into their reality, where I was simultaneously an underperforming waste of potential and a smoldering fuse.
But there was still something sharply, acutely sweet about that time, because every time I sat down with them, every time I observed one of the behavioral tics I had gotten to know so well growing up, I thought to myself, This could be the last time you see them smile like this. Or, This could be the last time you stand in the kitchen, drinking wine over dishes. These could be the last good times. A man is pursued by a tiger over a cliff, manages to grab a sapling halfway down, but then notices a second tiger waiting below. Within reach is a single perfect strawberry, sharply sweet. Gravity is inevitable, but so is strawberry season.
—R.