by Aster Olsen
We are 21 years old and it is New Year’s Eve in Gainesville, Florida. But we are not in that sleepy college town swallowed by live oaks draped in Spanish moss like dozing grey rat snakes full of stolen cardinal eggs. Instead we have ventured into Jacksonville, draped in grey snaking highways of asphalt which choke the city hungrily. We amble through IKEA and search for a queen bed frame because we are moving in together for our senior year at UF.
I prefer navigating the crowded isles of the store to the congested eight lane highways of the sprawled city. I prefer the way when I’m with her she sands the edges off my fear. We hold hands unselfconsciously and trade jokes and giggles about the choices made for the display rooms. This is very grown up of me, I think. This is how my life is supposed to go. I balance on a narrow path, deep bottomless pits of failure, of fear, but I’ve been inching forward, and I haven’t fallen yet. I think the fear can be avoided if I’m agile enough. Soon I will graduate, and start working, and it is okay, isn’t it, because she makes me laugh, and I make her laugh, and isn’t that enough for me?
Tired of highways and people, we drive backroads home. I’m relieved to cross Black Creek and reach the Belmore State Forest, the cracked two-lane road leaves behind the suburbs that stretch down Highway 21 along the St. John’s River. The suburbs stretch further each year, and I wonder when they will reach a reckoning, when they will run out of land to dredge and fill, when they will have to turn inwards, and face the city they flee. Not yet.
Soon we enter pinewoods and old swamp, and I uncurl tense muscles, unsnaking cords of tendons along my shoulders and neck. After a few minutes, no other cars are visible in the rearview mirror. Occasionally the pines clear away for a glimpse of rusted metal roof or sagging trailer. We pass by military drills in Camp Blanding, by the prison in Starke, by fields of potato, by a sprawling flea market, and then I slow down to three mph below the speed limit, because we are in Waldo, and their speed trap is notorious, and we just spent all of our money on a bed frame.
On New Year’s Day, she invites me to go bird watching at Payne’s Prairie, and we see osprey and snail kites circle against the blue winter sky, and grebes and teals and geese and widgeons slip between arrowroot and over hydrocotle below. The sky is clear, no clouds, and a nippy 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and I learn, as we walk along a dike, a nine-foot alligator sunning itself on the opposite bank, that when she was young she called these conditions Elf Days.
Later, after we assemble the metal and wood flat packed bed frame, we sit atop it side by side. My girlfriend asks me what I want to do after we graduate, and I do not know what to say. My mouth tries to form the shapes, but nothing fits, and I’m worried about what might tumble out. I do not know what I want to do, at all, I tell her, because it isn’t the truth, but it is as close to the truth as I can allow myself.
“But you must want something,” she insists, and she is right. She has identified me the way she identifies the sound of nighthawks dive-bombing outside of our apartment in the evening, swooping onto the bugs drawn towards the dim streetlamp illuminating the parking lot and rust flecked dumpsters.
“What I want isn’t possible,” I insist. “You wouldn’t want it anyway even if it was,” I explain to her, and to myself. “I cannot be what you want,” I say, and she sits next to me on our new bed and holds me, and gently strokes the back of my head, hand nestled in my shaggy hair, as I weep into her strong shoulder.
“I want you,” she whispers into my hair.
We are 28 years old and it is New Year’s Eve in Athens, Georgia. I’m too stoned to do anything other than watch the fireworks, pops of blue and red and white falling towards me against the night sky. The problem is, it’s only 10:30 pm, and there are no fireworks yet. I’m sitting with several friends, splayed on bark-brown plastic Adirondak chairs on the fake grass patio at the local brewery, and I am supposed to be talking and laughing and generally being outgoing. But the weed makes me withdraw. Everything occurs far away, and to someone else. In this state, I do not bother replying when someone says hello to me, just like I do not say “hello” when someone on TV looks into the camera at me. I mean to. But time isn’t working how it’s supposed to. I know there is an insurmountable distance, of time, of location, even if they don’t. Still, despite my current situation, distance is a feeling increasingly foreign, which is a thought that makes me smile.
After some time, perhaps five minutes or three hours, a figure glides towards me, backlit by the light spilling out from the door to the bar, and squats down next to me. She smells like cucumbers, and I think about giggling, because cucumbers are phallic, and isn’t it pretty funny that that such a phallic object is a feminine smell?
“Do you want to go home?” my wife asks.
I don’t. This isn’t my first New Year’s Eve since I transitioned (that prize was claimed the year before, or maybe even earlier, depending on how one defines a beginning), but this is the first New Year’s Eve where I feel beautiful. The hours of tearful electrolysis and the debt from facial surgery are easily worth my silver reflection. I’m wearing a short glittery dress without stockings, enjoying the balmy southern evening, and tonight I’ve actually done a decent job with my eyeliner. To celebrate, and because of nerves, because I’m afraid of a stranger’s disgusted stare, I’d agreed to take two hits of my friend’s vape pen when he’d offered it, and shortly after that I’d become catatonic.
It feels good to be around friends, even if I’m only able to sit here thinking. I feel safe and protected, which is good, because I am in no state to defend myself.
I do not know that this feeling of safety will grow more precarious in a few years’ time, that fear is not something that ever fully disappears, that my neighbors will be instructed by various media to fear my existence. That seems impossible to consider, because right now I’ve done the hardest, scariest thing in my life, and I’ve come out the other side of it, and none of my fears came to pass.
She’s still waiting on me to say something, so I fumble my hand onto her arm and grasp it weakly and definitely not very sexily.
“Are you trying to seduce me?” I reply with an exaggerated wink.
We ride our bikes home to our new house, careful to take backroads to avoid any drunk drivers. We don’t stay up till midnight. My parents live a twenty-five-minute drive outside the city, and tomorrow we are going bird watching together at Watson Mill Bridge, and we’d stupidly agreed to meet them there at 7:30 am.
When we bought the 1940s bungalow a year ago, our realtor had drawn up the paperwork as husband and wife, and I didn’t feel confident enough to correct her. The cottage has a second bedroom, and tonight I debate telling my wife that it could become our child’s bedroom, but I’m afraid to say that out loud. Don’t I have more than enough?
As we curl up in bed, tipsy and naked, I wonder if I still own the house now that I’ve updated my birth certificate, or if I’ve discovered some hidden technicality to escape debt. I tell my wife I’m going to start teaching classes about this one weird transsexual trick to get out of debt, and she laughs, and then we kiss until our lipsticks are smeared all over each other, and we fall asleep on the bed we bought in a different world.
We are 35 years old and it is New Year’s Eve in Capitol Hill, Seattle. We watch fireworks from a friend’s rooftop deck through clouds and drizzle. My cute outfit is hidden by a thick coat, and I cuddle closely against my wife for warmth. I rub the small blisters on my upper lip and chin, still lingering from yesterday’s touch up electrolysis session. I hadn’t realized how much I needed another trans woman to zap my face, to bestow both pain and wisdom— “the best cry proof mascara is Scorolush,” she’d told me as she gently wiped away my tears.
We have moved before, but never like this. It is a year of discovery, of previously unrealized potentials spreading forth like eager roots finding abundant groundwater after a long drought.
We spend New Year’s Day Nordic skiing. It’s my second time, and I only fall twice, unlike last time, when I came home covered in bruises, sore and ecstatic.
“Did you see the kids being pulled behind their parents on sleds?” I say on the drive home.
“That looks exhausting.” Her eyes are half closed, soaking in the post workout endorphins, afternoon sun warming her face. “Cute though.”
“I’d like to do that,” I venture. I glance over at her, and she’s looking back at me, eyes open and blue like deep water. I look at the road and wonder how to change the subject.
“You’ll get in really good shape trying to keep up with me,” her hand squeezes my thigh, and when I venture a glance over she smirks, and we drive towards the city, towards the melting winter sun kissing skyscrapers, and the hum of the road mixes with the soft sounds of Passion Pit, and the heater blows warm air that wraps us in a blanket of contentment.
The next day is Sunday, and we spend it in the Skagit Valley. There’s farmland between dots of cities, but it’s January and few crops are growing. Snow geese and widgets and ducks poke at the flooded fields, snapping up grubs. A red barn is framed by distant snow-capped mountains. There are no other cars on the single lane road; it’s not the way a GPS would route you. Several bicyclists roll by, bright neon clothing, like large songbirds joining in on the migration.
After a morning of bird watching, we eat lunch in Le Conner, then poke around the stores that line the street by the Skagit river. An artificial waterfall made from a hose and small rock cliff spilling into an ornamental pool persuade us into one store.
“Aren’t you afraid of being a parent?” my wife asks as we browse the shelves of crafts imported from Indonesia and Taiwan.
“I’ve been afraid my whole life,” I reply. I pick out a scarf full of colorful birds and flowers to hang on the wall above our bed.
We are 43 years old and it is New Year’s Eve in West Seattle. I pick up my child from a friend’s house, and we take the new Three Line to the terminus in Alaska Junction, then walk fifteen minutes to the bungalow. The walls are still half painted, and the floor of the living room is stripped down to base boards with pine floorboards neatly piled in the corner awaiting installation.
I worry how my kid will afford his own home someday. I worry a lot about my son and the world he’s born into. I worry that I won’t be able to keep him safe. When he cries, I hold him close, and I tell him I’ll always be here for him, that nothing bad will happen to him. It’s a lie. I understand too well my mortality, my own failures at keeping myself safe. Every day, I fear I will fail him. I fear I already have.
I successfully hide my worries, smile instead. My son is excited to take the new train; usually he hops onto my cargo e-bike, but the weather today is winter, and the trains recently opened after years of delay, and importantly, I want to take the train too.
The next day the three of us pile into the Subaru and drive I-5 up to the Skagit valley to bird watch. The three of us pile out of the Subaru with our binoculars, scarves whipping in the clear blue wind. There are flocks of thousands of snow geese on the flat open fields in front of a fading red barn and small single-story house. Three trees surround the house and compete with a string of power lines to be the tallest within miles. In the distance, snowcapped peaks of the cascades scoff, if they notice at all. We watch two bald eagles land and hunch close to one another in the muddy straw strewn field. One by one, more land, until there is a congress of seven.
“What do you think they’re discussing?” I ask the kid.
“Eagles can’t talk,” he objects.
My wife imitates an eagle, a sad warble that sets her face into an exaggerated frown.
“I talk with that eagle all the time,” I point, and she answers in her sad eagle language. That gets the laugh, and we spend the next hour making up eagle conversation: what’s for dinner, who’s flown the highest, where the best fish are found. Soon it devolves into drama about other birds.
“They think the geese and swans are too loud,” our kid says, and I agree.
On the way back to the car, we come across a strangely quiet swan. Another family has surrounded it, taking turns petting its head.
“This is the friendliest swan I’ve ever met!” the dad says. “He’s old and mellow.” He points to the swan’s brown and grey streaks of feathers that number amongst the more typical white ones. “He’s blind,” he tells us.
Soon they leave, and it is the three of us, and the quiet bird.
“Give it space,” my wife says. “Their nictitating membranes close like that when they’re stressed.”
After a few minutes the swan’s eyes open. Small black ovals that scan us for threat. The head wobbles unsteadily, and the swan lets out a soft gurgling call. It tries to stand, falls forward, then lays back down, jerking its head irregularly, awkwardly snaking its long neck back upon itself to look at her.
“Is it sick?” our son asks.
“I think so,” I say.
We call wildlife control and alert them of likely lead poisoning. Swans, my wife whispers to me, will sometimes swallow lead shot or fishing weights as they scour the sediments for insects. They’ll keep the lead in their gullet, slowly breaking it down, poisoning themselves unknowingly. By the time symptoms are noticeable, it’s often too late.
“We can offer it dignity,” she says to our son. “It’s always possible to offer that.” Carefully, gently, but firmly and quickly, she picks up the large bird and carries it off the trail, placing it on the soft mud bank next to an old mosquito ditch that is almost empty from the tide.
We construct a two-foot-tall fence between the trail and swan by breaking off dry dead twigs and sticking them in the mud around its spasming body. We work in silence for a few minutes, until our son breaks it.
“I wish I could speak swan to tell her I’m sorry she’s in pain,” he says, and I see the tears forming, and I know we will be unpacking this event for some time, but in this moment I cry not only because of the inadvertent cruelty of people, but also because, at least for now, my son rejects that such cruelty is necessary.
“I think she understands,” I tell him.
We are 50 years old and it is New Year’s Eve in West Seattle.
We are 57 years old and it is New Year’s Eve in West Seattle.
We are 64 years old and it is New Years Eve in Anacortes.
From my balcony I sip coffee and watch the Cascades pierce a low layer of clouds, white tips brushing against the gray-white clouds coating the sky like a layer of comforting wool. Light from the rising sun pokes through big leaf maple branches and reflects off snow and clouds. A ferry from San Juan Island glides into dock, rippling the still sea, birthing a stream of cars. The fields of solar panels glint across Fidalgo Bay, surrounding remnants of the decommissioned oil refinery, eager for the young light. Sometimes I imagine I catch a faint whiff of petroleum mixed into the salt air. Mornings are soft and quiet, no kid to hustle to school or bus to catch.
The kid lives and works in Seattle for one of the tech companies, but he’s recently met a girl, and she lives in Florida. He flew out the day after Christmas.
“You’ll miss the snow geese migration. All those birds flying north and south,” I tell him the day he leaves as he’s waiting for the train to the airport.
“Love birds fly west and east,” he counters with a grin. I resist asking him if he’s packed his binoculars.
He can work remotely, I know, and he should follow his passions, I know, and love is worth the fear of him leaving, I know. But I also know we can’t go birding, remotely.
“When do you think he’ll be back?” I ask my wife while we eat pancakes and a veggie scramble at our usual spot in Le Conner.
“Probably sooner than he wants, later than we want,” she says.
“Or they’ll U-Haul in a week,” I counter.
“He is our son,” she agrees.
“Do straight people do that? I forget.” She rolls her eyes at me.
“He’s lesbian socialized. Anything is possible.”
“A lesbian socialized bird nerd. Could have gone a lot worse.”
No matter who he turned out to be, I have only ever wanted him to find someone to go birding with. Someone he feels safe to be afraid around. Someone to grow and fail and learn with. Maybe it’ll be this Florida girl.
We park the old Subaru and walk down to the beach at Deception Pass. We walk hand in hand, and I press the familiar grooves of her palm to mine, and I remember shopping for our first bed frame. We take our time, joints aching, owls and children hooting in the distance. The ferns are thick and bright green and primordial, even in winter. The ferns make me feel young and hardy, like I could do this all over again. I try to imbibe their tender strength, their bravery to grow lush and beautiful while the sky is grey and the sun hidden. The ferns fear the winter will last and the sun will never bloom, but they are wrong every year. And every year they still shoot up tender fiddleheads.
I stumble on a loose rock and my wife shoots out her hand to steady me.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I still feel like I’m in my fifties,” I tell her with a grin, and she sticks out her tongue at me, her eyes and cheeks wrinkling into that familiar and beautiful smile.
There is only a single herring gull at the beach, curled up and sleeping. The tall bridge arches far overhead in the fading light. Grey, blue, black. Car headlights streak across while below water rushes in and out simultaneously, swirling chaotically. We stand in silence as the sun sets, cradling one another. I imagine my worries fading with the sun, dissipating into the night. This is very grown up of me, I think. This is how my life is supposed to go. This is all I ever wanted. I feel her warm breath against my neck, her short soft hair against my cheek. I match my breath to hers, and together our chests rise and fall.
Aster Olsen is a southern biologist and writer living in Seattle. She is published in Autostraddle, Inner Worlds, and Itch.io. Find more of her writing at asterolsen.com