Borderland

                                                  

If one word could define my life right now, that word would be "impermanence." Or maybe "unsustainable." "Precarity." "Transition." "Crisis."

Take your pick. 

However you slice it, the inescapable conclusion is that I'm living in a moment which cannot persist. This is a pause at a threshold. A foot hovering above a gas pedal. An eagle-eyed crouch at the starting line. It cannot be, shouldn't be--mustn't be--a way of life.

But I don't know what replaces it. Having figured out, at least a little bit, where I am, I can't work out where I'm supposed to go. I pinned a lot of hopes on a path forward with International Organization and was overjoyed when they selected me for an interview, but all that has been placed on ice owing to the pandemic. As has, it seems, much of the world.

It is bizarre and temptingly egocentric that my personal entry into an existential waiting room has coincided with the rest of the global population doing the same thing. At least up here, things seemed to be getting better throughout the late summer and into the early fall--until, suddenly, they weren't. Until, suddenly, the sickness was everywhere. 

 On Monday, October 12, I returned from my lunch break around 12:30 in the afternoon--returning from my apartment, as it were, which is one of the benefits of living in the same building where you work--to find the students stuffing backpacks and slipping on jackets. 

"What are they all doing?" I asked Mr. Coin, my newest principal.

"It's in the village," he responded, eyes dark. "The busses will be here at 1."

And then they were gone. 

No one seems to know for sure when they'll come back, but the outbreak spreading in the community is clearly uncontrolled--even some of the teenagers are becoming really ill--and the inclination seems to be that we should opt for caution over quickness. We may, Mr. Coin confided, be expected to work remotely until the middle of January--which inspired a brilliant conclusion on my part followed by an equally swift moral torpedo.

"So, if we're not going to be in the classrooms until January...can I just peace out to the East Coast?" I asked. "There's not really any point to being here."

"I don't see why that would be a problem," he answered. "If the work is remote it makes no difference where you do it from. Let me ask around and I'll let you know if we're good to go."

We're not good to go.

Because even as I imagined the joys of an extended holiday homecoming--hanging out for a month with my grandmother, popping over to see my best friend and her son, surprising my sister amid the stresses of her senior year of high school--I saw the pitfalls following close behind. My grandmother is 78. Aunt Crazy, the redoubtable loon whose admonitions that "it's hard out here to be a pimp" and questionable professions of fondness for cocaine have long enlivened family gatherings, is around the same age and in poor health.

And then there's Sweet Aunt. 

Sweet Aunt, who's shown kindness to anyone she's ever known. Sweet Aunt, who turned away from an upbringing my father couldn't overcome and raised a compassionate, brilliant, hard-working son. Sweet Aunt, whose breast cancer had reached Stage 3 before they found it a month ago.

"I'm scared," she told me by phone when we spoke recently. "The treatment they're doing is very aggressive and it's going to take a lot out of me. Your cousin came over the other day, and I thought, 'He's too young for this. Too young to have a sick mother. He shouldn't have to see this.' And it's a three-hour drive each time he makes the trip."

"But don't you know," I countered. "That he wants to be there because he's such a great person? Because you raised such a good man?"

"That's what Uncle Mustache said," she answered. "He asked me, 'Wouldn't you do anything for your child?'" She started to cry. "I said, 'Yes.' And he told me, 'Then you have to let him do this for you.'"

I can't be the cause of any more danger befalling this queen of a woman, who even with cytotoxin flowing through her veins could think only of the child to whom she's given everything. He's an accountant now, married to a doctor. Last summer they bought their first house. 

The draw homeward is like a harpoon hooked right into my heart, and I can practically taste how badly I want to answer its pull. But not at that risk. Not at that cost.

"What are you doing for Christmas?" I asked Miss Violet by telephone. "I think I'm staying in Alaska."

It would be the second year in a row, though the naive version of me who existed in the autumn of 2019 couldn't have known that. I remained then because my bank account couldn't quite absorb the cost of heading back east. Now, in Viaborea, I have a well-padded wallet against which the price of a first-class ticket home is no obstacle. But other obstacles have emerged.

It's hard not to see some cosmic alignment in the world being on pause when my entire life is so totally, resolutely, inescapably frozen in place. Think about it. I know that I'm almost certainly a transgender woman, but lingering doubts and the difficulties of navigating hormone therapy in so isolated an environment have stayed me from transition. I know that I need to be in an urban environment but am not sure how--or if--to break down the door into Iceport. I know that I don't want to be a teacher forever but, with my most credible alternative held up in Covid-related paralysis, haven't found another course.

I've identified a slew of needed changes--that I uniformly cannot act on, at least not now. What gives?

And the backdrop to all of this, fittingly, is the ongoing disintegration of a Republic that will receive either a qualified reprieve or a death knell in a little more than two weeks' time. A week ago, mindful of what life as a trans person and a liberal during a second Trump term might look like, I hopped into my car and drove down the highway. To the edge of a happy realm ruled by a kind queen.

I knew, of course, where the border lay. Knew that place was on the other side. But I had to see it. I just had to see that it was real.

The boundary of these two great nations is not, incidentally, guarded on the Canadian side--go figure--and so, though I came with the intent only of peeking into Canada, I wound up blazing straight across the demarcation and into the Yukon Territory without being any the wiser. When the road signs changed to kilometers and provincial flags started waving in the wind, I got a hint that maybe something wasn't quite right.

"Wait a minute, did I just...? No fucking way."

If you're going to accidentally wander into another country, though, you might as well stop to take pictures, and the respective governments had conveniently provided a lovely pagoda perfect for quiet reflection. A line in the gravel--or paint on a bench--was all that separated me from a country where no one went without healthcare. Where every child who wanted could attend university. Where people like me were respected and protected. Where the government worked for its people. 

I knelt before that marker and clasped my hands in prayer (a habit that, doubt and temptation aside, I can't seem to quite shake).

The day may come when I have to cross this border in a very different way, I told Him. For a very different reason. If it comes, please bless my journey. Please get me there swiftly. Please keep me safe.

Had you told me at any point in my childhood or adolescence that I would stand a credible chance of needing to flee my homeland as a political refugee, I would have regarded you with a slight amount of incredulity. Then again, the whole Plague-2.0 and being-a-woman things would also have thrown me for a loop, so I guess 2020 has put a lot of stuff out of whack.

And am I woman? I don't know. I mean...more or less? I guess that's the best answer I can give. I feel like a woman (inwardly, duh). I'm pretty sure I think like a woman. For as long as I can remember I've idolized, emulated, aspired to, and wanted to be like, well, women. Rose DeWitt Bukater. The Pink Power Ranger. Rachel from Animorphs. Amelia from The Princess Diaries. In my youth, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and Kelly Clarkson. In my adulthood, Meghan Markle and Taylor Swift (a living goddess if ever there was one). Those were my girls. Sometimes, joining their ranks feels impossible to the point of comedy--and I, whoever the hell I am, should give up on that lest I become this contemptible she-male thing that repulses both genders while passing for neither. 

Toxic thoughts, I know. Not representative. Not helpful. And hormones work wonders. But the Dark Night of the Soul comes each evening like clockwork. Who among us doesn't slip into its depths from time to time?

Every now and again I can't see any path forward to a happy future, and that scares me more than most things in this very scary world. How, I sometimes wonder, will it all end for me? The other night I had a dream that I again attempted suicide--not, in case anyone is worried, an item on my to-do list--and my grandmother was weeping over me.

"I can't believed it happened twice," she cried. "I can't believe it happened twice!"

I'm in sort of an odd place here. I have ironclad job security. A paycheck heavy enough to knock out a medium-sized child. Financial security. A clear career trajectory, at least if I stay in my current field. And yet I've seldom felt such a paucity of purpose or hope. I pray, day in and day out, that all of us get better soon.