After my eyes are scanned and my palm gets read by a machine, Matt smiles widely and walks me to the front of the security line while asking me how I’m doing. I lie and say I’m fine, but can’t force a smile as he hands my info to the TSA officer who scrutinizes my face. I know in about five minutes I’m about to get a pat down while my unbelted jeans threaten to fall off, my arms out like a scarecrow, from an officer who is reluctant, yet insistent, in understanding the shape of my body under my clothes. Being nonbinary trans is confusing to some people.
If I really answered Matt, because I thought he had the time to care, I’d tell him I’m sad – just impossibly sad – about so many things. I’m not sure how anyone is functioning in this particular moment in time. I would tell him that my little squishy, human-creature brain can’t really comprehend our global suffering and I waffle back and forth between feeling like the best thing I can do is keep going, one step at a time, in whatever direction seems the most open, or coming to a complete halt, nestling under the pile of clean clothes waiting on the couch for me to fold them, while watching Zac Efron and Darin Olien help save baby kangaroos after a fire in Australia.
I would tell Matt that the losses in the last few years have gutted me and that I don’t choose to share about it much because everyone else is barely standing upright as well, but that has come with the cost of connection, and sometimes I feel so starkly alone I’m see-through. I’d tell him that I keep pacing myself and doing my best to stay open to connection and I also feel like I’m failing at it with most people, which triggers my people-pleasing parts into overcompensating, which sends me into an exhausted doom spiral, which I barely pull out of before spectacularly crashing (Come on, Mav, do some of that pilot shit!).
“Matt,” I would say, a hand laid easily on his shoulder, “I’m scared most of the time that I’m a terrible host to the ecosystems living in, on, and around me, but I refuse to give up, possibly because I’m stupidly stubborn, but it’s kept me alive this long, so I’m gonna keep going.” I’d give his arm a slight squeeze before walking away, turning once to look back and say, “You take care, Matt!” And, I’d mean it.
A guy deplaning passes me as I’m waiting at the gate, and turns to his friend and loudly whispers, “I hate that hair style,” while making a thumb motion towards me. His friend, swinging his bag onto a shoulder, turns to take a look, and grunts in agreement while maintaining eye contact with me for a few long seconds.
I watch them walk away until they pass around the corner from my view, leaving their turdy comment squatting next to me at gate N1.
~.~.~
The person next to me on the plane has ended up in the middle seat. I do what I can to keep my body to myself during the flight, tucked into the window as best I can, hyper-aware of each instance the cuff of my sweater falls on their side and where my elbows are at all times, leaving them the arm rest which they finally take advantage of halfway through our two hour, fifteen minute flight. We don’t say a single word to each other, but by the end I’ve learned that they are learning Spanish (Grito!), that they have a younger sibling who will pick them up from the airport, that they have a Pinterest board with dark wood paneled dream rooms, filled with kitsch in hues of blues and greens, they prefer diet soda over regular, they are gluten-free, and they have a habit of intermittently jacking their left knee up and down at a frantic pace and yanking on the strings of their sweater when they are nervous. They get nervous a lot. I think about offering them one of the dozen fidgeters I have in my possession, but decide not to because I would have to actually talk to them and that seems too hard.
I wonder what they might have learned about me on the flight as I slowly exit the plane behind them, my backpack hitting the seats as I walk down the aisle, sardined between someone I know, but didn’t meet, and someone nipping my heels, who sees me as something standing between them and freedom. I wonder if they learned nothing about me because they weren’t conditioned to situationally be hyper-aware. I wonder if they noticed that I tried to not encroach on their middle-seat-space. I wonder if I’ll ever feel safe enough to take up space without guilt. I wonder if I will always be a people-pleaser, unconsciously hoping to soothe myself with positive feedback to feel like I’m good.
~.~.~
My son and I are at the bowling alley slash arcade. He’s walking around with the 5-year-old collecting tickets for future prizes. I’ve been following the 3-year-old around watching him slam his tiny fist down on buttons with flashing lights and carnival music. We don’t need money for these machines. He’s happy just to have free rein of the place and access to any machine he wants.
After awhile, we corral the grands to a booth on the far side of the cavernous room for lunch. They are perfectly wonderful, these two. The older one did Legos with me for several hours the day before. He’s got the precision, dexterity, and patience of an older child and can do the age 10+ Lego sets by himself. But, he humors me so I can feel included and allows me to find the upcoming blocks for him, setting them just so on the pictures in the instruction manual, before completing the entire page all at once. He is meticulous with the creative brain of a builder. He forges entirely new games, complete with multi-step rules, on the spot. He also (almost) always wins them.
The younger one has dandelion-puff, blond curls all over his head and the smile of an angel. He has sparkly eyes. He spontaneously comes up to you to tell you he likes the color of your shirt or that he loves you. Your heart has no choice but to burst in joy, basking in his sweet gaze.
The intensity of living with both of them among all these gorgeous, cherished moments would be too much to experience for mere humans. The Universe knows this, so along with the love note handed to me on brightly-colored, crumpled construction paper and the “heart” made out of fuzzy pipe cleaners wadded into a ball lovingly tucked into my backpack pocket, and all the snuggles and hugs, they have both been delightedly egging each other on to increasingly higher levels of potty mouth.
My son and his wife have tried ignoring, scolding, and explaining, but it’s a too-compelling rush for the 3-5-year-old set to refer to everything as “Farty Pants.” So there has been a lot of Farty Pants-ing by this duo the last couple of days. Levels their parents could not imagine nor ignore. As a grandparent, I have a backseat to the drama, so I got to walk around, bemused, as this adorable baby cheerfully yelled, “Farty Pants!” while pounding repeatedly as hard as he could on bright, red START buttons that do not start, while feeling a bit envious of his ability to unabashedly do what he wanted.
My son gets the boys to sit still long enough on the vinyl booth seats to remind them that we don’t say Farty Pants in public if we want to have our tablets later. He gets them both to acknowledge what he’s saying and they sagely nod and say, “Yes, Dad,” in unison. We order something called Liquid Death that turns out to be canned water, sporting the font and flames from a Hot Topic button-up from the 1990s worn by Guy Fieri, and chicken nuggets and fries, which are two of the only foods the older one eats, along with a side of ranch, which the younger one will delightfully shotgun by the end of the meal, leaving a giant smear of ranch across the bridge of his nose.
The waitress says, “I’ll get that right out to you.” And my grandson looks at her with his big, sweet smile and says, “Thank you, Farty Pants!”
~.~.~
The flight home feels shorter. I have the row to myself so instead of worrying about how I’m being perceived, I watch stupid streaming shows on my phone instead of the news, but the news catches up to me about fifteen minutes before we land when the voice over the speakers tells us that a Pro-Palestine protest shut down the freeway near the airport and we might be delayed getting picked up. I support the protest and I’m glad it happened. Being slightly delayed being picked up feels like an incredibly small price to pay compared to the genocide thats happening. Not everyone on my flight agrees with me and I quickly learn that several people in the rows near me have a very different view of what’s happening in Gaza.
One of the most vocal people is a brunette woman directly across the aisle from me, who begins making loud phone calls as soon as the wheels touch the ground, to a parade of people we can’t hear. By the tone of her half of the conversations, they must all be as outraged as she is. I roll my eyes to myself when she says for the fourth time, to the fourth person, “if this makes me late for the dinner with Scott tonight I’m going to be furious.”
People jump up when we roll up to the gate to stand awkwardly in the isles, heads tilted to the side to avoid getting banged by the opening overhead compartments. When it gets to be my turn, I stand up at the same time as the very vocal woman. She sticks a leg into the aisle, then stops short as I hoist my backpack over my shoulder, impatiently gesturing that I could go first. I shake my head, also gesturing, and say, “No, you go.” I know my knees need to unfold after a couple of hours of being cramped and walking will be painful and slow. The last thing I want is an impatient, rude, and annoyed person pushing at the rear.
She exasperatedly throws both hands up and says, “Ok,” grabbing her bags and hustling out.
“But, thank you,” I throw after her, which she does not acknowledge or maybe even hear, and under my breath I add, “Farty Pants.”
—Previously posted on Substack