Sunday, March 9, 2025

The plane touched down and I let out a breath– I want to say I didn’t realize I was holding it in, but that would be both a cliché and a lie. I didn’t used to be scared of flying, but that was before I had anything to lose. Before I could understand why my mom said the shema before every take off, and whispered baruch hashem when we landed. But I was by myself this Sunday, as I have been so many other times I’ve flown, and it felt sacrilegious, profane even, to thank a god that I neither talk to nor know if I believe in for a safe trip, but I did it anyway. I thanked the captain on the way out as well, covering all my bases and ensuring that if anyone asked I could please all parties. 

It was hot in Palm Beach, nearly fifty degrees warmer than it had been when I flew out of Logan Airport earlier that morning. The sweaty air wet my hair and I could smell myself with every step I took, self conscious not to get too close to any of the blonde shiksas who got into their pre-ordered Ubers and cars with personal drivers named Jeeves. Dripping, I walked towards the yellow taxi that I pretended reminded me of home– I’m not really from New York, even if my dad, who is, says I can claim it as my own. I followed the overly complicated instructions my neurotic and loving grandmother gave me and after some wrong turns we arrived at my grandparent’s house. During the ride, the cab driver got a call from his distraught daughter, who was having CPS called on her as he drove me into the PGA gated resort complex where my grandparents stayed for the winter. They hung up, and he told me everything that was happening through broken English that I guiltily tried to understand. I said I was sorry, and that I hope everything turns out okay, and he said thank you, that will be eighty dollars. 

***

Saturday, March 8

Invisible ink iMessages are one of those confounding inventions that gives you the same thrill and fear as having sex in a bar bathroom, or seeing your ex across the room at a party. It’s simultaneously as real and fake as the word forever is. Less powerful than a real kiss, but stronger still than texting “ily” over the phone. It’s a wet sock in the warm rain; a coming of age moment that eventually you’ll remember for the growth and the second of freedom you tricked yourself into while listening to the soundtrack to a movie you once swore was your favorite “of all time.” 

It had only been two days since I saw my girlfriend at the time, but I was in Boston now with my friends, and she was in Chicago with hers. In line for Dani’s Queer Bar, a destination I had long anticipated and expected to go to as a single woman, my phone buzzed in my back pocket as my friend Emma pulled out a cigarette. The line was long and winding, reminding me of the Charles River we were so close to and that I had one day, a long time ago, thought I would inevitably live near. Doesn’t everyone move to Boston after graduation? 

Of course I had been thinking about her, I was used to being a one minute walk away from each other and having sleepovers almost every night. I opened the text message and, with the swiftness of a child hiding their sticky, chocolate-stained fingers, I positioned my phone so that only I could see the image, hidden by the invisible ink feature, she sent me. Another 1,000 miles of separation, and yet now I could see her as if she were in front of me. The way I was used to, the way I of course longed for, the way I wouldn’t be for a whole week, nearly the longest time apart since we started dating. 

I took this moment in and when we were finally inside the bar I said I had to pee– a believable fib, as we had just finished downing tequila shots and pregaming with canned espresso martinis– and beelined for the bathroom. I absorbed the moment; somehow it felt less dirty to send dirty texts in a dirty bar than it would in my grandparents’ spotless, white, marbled home. Old people have more sex than anyone else, and I read somewhere that Gen Z is the least sexually active of any living generation, probably because of Covid and the internet and a deep-seeded awkwardness that prevents us from truly talking to each other. I didn’t have phone sex in the bathroom, it was all-gender and multi-stall, and despite the openly queer nature of the bar– did I mention it was also Sapphic night?– I couldn’t commit to something so full and intentional as that. I looked, but did not touch. She asked me to come to her now, that she wished I could be next to her, to try to teleport. I said I would, I promise I would if I could. 

We stopped sending invisible ink messages after a few minutes and I went to dance with my friends in a sea of lesbians. Somehow, three and a half hours away from Burlington, a former fling of mine was there at Dani’s too, with a new girl and freshly dyed hair. My heart beat extra fast for a minute, but it quickly settled after another $15 shot that I cleared as quickly as I had the invisible ink. I felt invigorated. I knew something no one else knew, did something no one else did, it had been just me and her as it was when we were physically together. I let all of those thoughts prepare me for the encounter I would have to have; it’s better than avoiding and pretending we don’t see each other. I said hi with the confidence of being freshly fucked, though we both knew that couldn’t be true.

***

Sunday, March 9

The first night in Florida I hardly slept. The bed was uncomfortable, it was a twin, and it reminded me of living in the dorms. My grandmother had the master bedroom, while my grandfather, fresh out of the hospital and preparing for another major surgery, took the main guest room. I was left to reside in the kids’ room, the room with two twin beds next to each other, the room that made me feel small and guilty. My mind wandered to the night before in Dani’s and the texts we sent. It’s silly, but I believe our generation is cursed with false-proximity in a way the carrier pigeon and Pony Express ones weren’t. There was no way to pretend to be nearby when the picture delivered was something physical and sepia that you could hold in your hand. 

Eventually I must have slept, because I awoke the next morning to the sound of lawn mowers and birds chirping and the sun in my eyes in a way that screamed, honey you are not in Vermont anymore. The ice had melted and so had my head. I was a jumble of confusion as my first thought when I looked over at the other twin bed was: where is my sister? The only times growing up that I shared a room were with her, always twin beds, always next to each other. Where was she? 

My grandparents both had their own plans that day, so I went for a walk. I explored and walked past a golf course, forcing myself to ignore the fact that most people there had probably voted for Trump and would hate to know what I had done and where I had been last night. I called my mom back in Connecticut. She would have come down to spend the week with me too, if she had not had to travel back and forth for a month while my grandpa was in the hospital. He had a blood clot, and then he had pneumonia, then A-Fib, a kidney stone, and God knows what else. Maybe She doesn’t. He hadn’t been an old man over Thanksgiving. He sat in my living room in Weston with the grandeur of a man who had travelled the world– and he had. I knew Singapore and India and Hungary vicariously through him. He had been an international tradesman, and named his business “The Libra” after my grandmother’s star sign. She was born on October 11, 1942. 72 years before we adopted my now 10 year old dog on the same day. 76 years before I learned that her birthday is on National Coming Out Day.

It started to rain, and I wondered what difference it would make if I stayed in this unheated pool forever. What if I never flew back to Connecticut, or Burlington, or Boston, or Chicago, or whatever location would please my family most? 

On Wednesday we went to Palm Beach, the Rodeo Drive of Southern Florida, or so my grandma called it. We walked past bleach blonde models and men in suits so expensive I couldn’t help but laugh.  We didn’t buy anything, but we did have lunch. She got a sandwich, eating the innards with a fork, carefully and intentionally avoiding the bread at all costs. She was a mother during the peak of the “carbs are evil” era. I told her it won’t hurt to eat the bread, you need carbs, food is fuel, as I hypocritically picked at my croutonless salad. Over a glass of wine and a margarita, hers and mine respectively, she asked me if my partner was the only person I was “seeing.” I said yes, of course, she’s my girlfriend, I don’t understand the confusion, you don’t ask my cousins in their heterosexual relationships that question. But at the same time, I wasn’t seeing her. She was a flight away, and picture her face and look at those pictures as I might, it wasn’t the same. I think they lied when they said distance makes the heart grow fonder– it just makes the feelings you have more intense, as you do everything you can to remember and believe that aching in your chest is longing and lust and not sadness. 

Before I knew it, it was already Thursday, and we were all looking at the same full blood moon from separate corners of the country. I was asleep, preparing for my arduous journey through luxury airports the next morning, but I felt the red glow on my face at 2:30 in the morning. When I woke up, sluggish and angry four hours later, I saw pictures from Connecticut, from Massachusetts, from Vermont, and the odd Maryland. Different angles of the same sight.

I was back in Burlington on Friday. So much and nothing at all had happened in those two weeks. Cumulatively, I took 50,000 steps over seven days, alternating between walking three to four miles a day– out of duty to my grandmother’s frequent comments on my body or a yearning to be healthy and exercise like I new everyone should, I didn’t know– and laying, basking in the sun.

You look tan, my friend said as she picked me up from the airport.

Oh, do I? I responded through an invisible ink smile.