June 16th, 2022 10:16 PM PST

I feel out of place here. This city is so big and so wide and so loud that my attention wants to be everywhere from here to there but also nowhere at once. The plane ride was, honestly, okay. I had less than 5 hours of sleep because, like I said, I was nervous but excited but scared but happy. If I had to describe, tangibly, it was like a snake—sharp-toothed and frigidly stiff, yet it wound itself around me but never squeezed. That feeling was still present, even after three days. I was anxious about so many things but almost nothing at the same time. It was as if my entire experience thus far was too contradictory to actually be knit together, like sewing two pieces of thread into one another only to have it fall apart.

When we landed, we explored and it was nice, but I dreaded being in the city.

I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Day one, we landed, came here, and then went out—free but also confined. There was a want to go further out but I don’t didn’t know where I was. I barely knew where we were staying. Day one was anything other than stressful; it was nerve-wracking. Not in a bad way—I wasn’t constantly worrying about what was around me or who was around me or where I was. This was not a mirror maze; I was not confused.

But I did feel small. I feel out of place. In Wisconsin, you feel eyes everywhere. Your existence as a queer person or anything other than the normal was and is always present. Whether you think it or you believe it, you are the center of attention sometimes—or it feels like it. Gazes and glares. But here, between the noise and the light and the everything, I was not in it. It was around me like air. I found myself easily not falling into the spotlight. I simply was around and here and there but my presence wasn’t loud. Everything else was loud.

I wasn’t standout. I wasn’t center of attention, but it felt like it. To worry about my presence or my existence came as naturally as breathing. It happened on its own and the feeling became regular, apparent, another part of me until we landed and I finally stepped outside. Now, the feeling was not a part of me. Instead, it was gone

But, strangely, I enjoyed it. The smallness I shrunk to in San Francisco allowed me to feel happier, more assured in my identity as a queer person. I reckoned with gender-nonconformity while here. I surged through the embers and the ashes of burning away expectations of androgyny but also expectations of queerness. The brilliant thing about being queer is the lack of definition, the lack of walls and boundaries as to how far i can stretch or wish not to, because this is me. 

And I hadn’t realized all of that until I looked up at the clock and smiled. Late night writing followed by late night discoveries. For the first time in a very long time, I found myself smiling not at a joke or a person or at anything congruent to the space i was in, but what was in the space: a quiet condo, most of the lights off, and only me at the dining table in my shrunken and insignificant identity. I was smiling not at anything. I smiled for me.