I grew up in an isolating kind of suburb for a closeted queer. The sort of place that prided itself on its respectability, festooned itself in normative life. It was a middle class sort of place where everyone mortgaged houses to look richer than they were, and I was the kid from the mobile home park on the outskirts, waiting an hour between buses to get anywhere.
I was good at pretending. I was neatly split apart, as environments like these ask you. Sometimes, when I’d complain online about being lonely, people would ask me if I couldn’t just track down my local queer meetup, and I’d have to explain: I could only find one, a gay & lesbian group, that occasionally remembered bi people existed, had no place for trans people, let alone a genderqueer like me, had a monthly fee just to join and it hadn’t had an event in months. The other queers of this city were either just as closeted, or they had managed to escape before I did.
But it was Thanksgiving, the first Thanksgiving that I was on my own, having run away from home that August, dashing out the back door at 5:30 in the morning. The previous year, I’d spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with a friend, my punishment for…well, you can guess if you know my other writing, but there’s no space to hash it out here. But my friend’s family had moved and I was looking at the holiday season feeling completely alone, until these friends I met online invited me to their Queer Thanksgiving, in Portland.
I think this stands out to me even more than the act of running away from home, because I think it was the first moment I realized I had done it. My every move had been accounted to my mother and her approval. I made this travel decision with no one’s input but my own, no one but tumblr to talk about it to, and that was when it finally sunk in that I had left.
I left straight from work on Tuesday afternoon, hopped local transit to Union Station and then greyhound-ed my way to Portland. We left Union Station at about 5:30 pm, the sky darkening quickly into night, the footrests on the bus blowing warm air on our feet, and I popped my earbuds in, turned on my mp3 player, and listened to music quietly (The soundtrack to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to be specific), letting myself sink into something for the first time in three months.
I had to transfer busses in Sacramento in the middle of the night and once settled into my new bus, it began to rain. I dozed in and out of sleep, letting the dark and the rain and the bus and the warm hold me, everyone else just as tired, just as quiet.
Through rural Oregon I chatted with people who were traveling to see relatives, people who couldn’t believe I’d come all this way from California. They were taking the greyhound because it was the only transit they could get to travel from one part of the area to another. My last seatmate got off at, I believe it was Medford or maybe just after, and then the bus was empty enough again for me to be sitting by myself.
Traffic was bad because of three accidents on the freeway, and as our scheduled arrival time came and went, and the bus was still crawling along, our driver with a bit of a daredevil tone in his voice, asked us if we were all cool with him pulling us off the freeway and trying to forge a different route.
I’d been traveling for over 24 hours, pulling into Portland at 5:30pm and when the sight of the city greeted me, I nearly cried. Again: I’d been to Colorado (Colorado Springs, specifically, because family lives there) once, and that was the extent of my traveling. I’d been to downtown LA, sure, but nothing, nothing looked like Portland. I was used to dry and drought, empty riverbeds and brush, and here the Willamette shined out through the night and my heart flipped over.
I had done nothing but pretend for so long. I had one fellow closeted queer friend in my hometown, my platonic soulmate, and we clung to each other in the oppressive, performative demands of our hometown, with only each other to talk to about these parts of ourselves. And now here, in Portland…I felt like a fraud. I didn’t know how to act, how to be myself underneath this layer of person I’d constructed for others. I was wide-eyed and overwhelmed, and certain at any point someone was going to ask me why I was even here.
It rained most of the time I was here. Soaked through my holey shoes I’d been trying to make last. My friends bought a space heater at a black friday sale in part because I was shivering so much. I let my wet feet dry in front of it while we stayed up late into the night talking. It felt like home. Ten years, since my first visit to Portland, A whole decade has passed and the me then would have no idea at the time that it would be my home, that friends would become family, that less than a year later I’d be buying a one way Amtrak ticket, and here’d I’d be.