On exhalation.

February 19, 2025

For $59, an over-stuffed bag, and an early morning flight to London, I bought myself my first breath since November 5th.

If I were my former self (not him, but the her who used to hurt herself to quell the pain), a decision like this would have been incredibly ill-advised, and would have probably lead to me ending up in some extremely questionable situations. When life opens a door for you, though, I always choose to walk through it. That’s why I’m the luckiest girl in the world.

London is full of difficult memories for me from the aftermath of my previous job. For a while, I felt like I was building a micro-life there. I had my favorite queer bar, a tattoo artist, the same AirBnB host for every trip, and a basic grasp on the Tube (easy-peasy after mastering the MTA). I had couches and pull out beds to crash on. Well, I guess I still do, I just don’t crash them like I used to. As problematic as the U.K. is for trans rights now, it is so incredibly disquieting that I feel safer there than on U.S. soil.

I touched down late on Tuesday night and went straight to E’s for some dinner and much needed catching-up. Technically, it was our first “business meal” as colleagues now, and we covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. After we retired to hers and stayed up much too late, it felt like I blinked and I was at St. Pancras for 7am, getting ready to spend the day meeting some old friends and puttering around London as a semi-local again.

However, the real reason I maniacally hopped a mistake fare across the pond was for the surprise opportunity to visit Holland for the first time in 13 years. I thought I’d use this sign from the universe to test the waters to see if it could be the next stop in my seemingly perpetual search for a Home Safe. I snagged a €60 Eurostar Snap ticket from London to Amsterdam Centraal, and as soon as my foot touched the earth of mainland Europe, I knew my decision had already been made.

Up until now, I had been battling a bunch of random health complications that came seemingly out of nowhere. My hair has been falling out. I’ve had eczema on my face for the first time ever. I haven’t been sleeping well—either barely at all, or with a feverish inability to escape bed for days. I lost 20 pounds in a month and a half. I know exactly what is causing it, and I’m powerless to stop it.

The kind of toll that stress like anticipating a genocide wreaks on the body and mind is caustic and insidious. Even while doing everything possible to control the other variables—limiting my screen time, practicing mindfulness, or any of the other bullshit that my psychiatrist prescribes instead of Xanax—there is no way to avoid thinking about my rights disappearing and my friends dying. You can feel it in the nitrogen of American air, at least in NYC, and absolutely with the trans community. We are collectively holding our breath to avoid sucking down the poison surrounding us.

One fresh lungful in the Netherlands and I felt my alveoli expand wider than they have in months. I caught the (free) ferry across to Noord and checked into a hostel where I immediately made friends with a group of goofy Brazilian guys who gave me a nice morsel of magic mushrooms after I decimated them one-by-one at pool. Towards the early hours of the morning, there was a young, tiny girl who had just started two weeks of a 3 month solo backpacking trip—her first ever. I learned she was from Minnesota, and her father was a famous helicopter medic. We swapped stories about our experiences with bipolar disorder: my personal struggles, and hers relating to a sister with bipolar I who could switch from loving to lashing in seconds. I taught her the quarter roll trick, and gave her the Hong Kong $5 coin that I’d managed to somehow not lose for almost 3 months. I told her that if she kept it safe, it would do the same for her. It had for me.

The rest of my time in Amsterdam was spent exploring by bicycle, checking out places like Café Saarein (a lesbian bar with a free, well-maintained pool table that I could see as my usual haunt if I were to live around the block) and Pllek (a huge food-hall in Noord that felt like the gritty, urban vibe of East Berlin). Like every new city I travel to, or one that I return to after a long time away, I simply wandered around and allowed myself to be absorbed by the anonymity that being a foreigner brings. I met a very cool Dutch guy, Wail, whom I spent a few hours teaching pool. He ended up being a software engineer building a flight school education app, and he seems interested in chatting further about possibly turning it into a business one day. Exactly the chance encounter I needed to make the trip a business expense.

In a not-very-serious try at exploring somewhere less hectic than a big city to live in, I took a train over to Utrecht to check-out one of the smaller, more traditionally Dutch towns as an alternative to Amsterdam. After I settled into the hostel, and begged AI to try and find me a lesbian party to go to on Valentine’s Day, I ended up at BodyTalk. This was heralded as the “party bar”, in comparison to the low-key café kitty corner, and it was definitely lively (but less so than even the calmest queer spot in Brooklyn). There seemed to be some sort of gay mixer going on, as people wearing name tags kept coming up and trying to speak with me in rapid fire Dutch, before promptly turning away once they realized the fruitlessness of their efforts. After the entire bar erupted into simultaneous song, and in between the blaring airhorns signifying the change between networking rounds, I made eye contact with a girl who seemed just as scared and confused as a I was. After buying her a drink from the stereotypically tall-hot-and-mean Doll tending the bar, we bonded over our love of the Last of Us and agreed to head across the street to the quieter joint.

As is typical with every lesbian date (spontaneous or not), we spent the next few hours swapping stories about our various life traumas. We learned that we both came from families riddled by addiction, that we both struggled with mental illness and other hidden demons, and that we both cared so deeply about the wellbeing of others. It is those that have sank the lowest who always seem to have the most kindness to give. After we wrapped up at the bar, I took her out to get some food before offering a lesson at a pool hall, and sneaking her into my hostel room after she missed her train. She tried in futility to insist on waiting in the freezing cold at the station until 7am, wearing the thinnest, barely-wool coat, with no gloves or hat. In the morning, I offered her my second favorite sweater and pair of hand warmers before we shared breakfast and she had her first (!) latte ever. We finished our rendezvous at the station, agreeing that we had to see each other again because she was now my inaugural, and therefore, best Dutch friend.

Later that night, I caught a train to Gare du Nord from Centraal to spend a couple days in Paris with my dear friend Sadie before I headed home. With her infectious exuberance and jubilation, she showed me around to the best cafés, most beautiful galleries, and quirkiest furniture stores in the 11th on our Sunday together. On Monday, I took (not my) President’s Day off and did my anonymous-wanderer thing up to a coffeeshop, where I had a zoom call with a stern Dutch immigration attorney about starting the DAFT visa process.

On the way there, I felt above the clouds. I made eye contact and smiled at beautiful French women. People said “Bonjour!” to me spontaneously. I actually felt human. After some solo lunch at a traditional French café along the canal, I broke into shards. I texted my two best friends that I was leaving by the end of the summer, and they both assured me they loved me. One of them even thanked me, and I thought “for what? for abandoning you and everyone else I love to die?” I wept silently through the streets of Paris, like I am now on this airplane home.

That night, I met Cé's sister T, who is exactly how she was described to me. She's like the colder, sharper version of her older sister, and we immediately hit it off. Like Cé, she was also much too quick to try and blame what is happening in America on Americans, but she was willing to quietly listen to me plead their case. How quick we are to judge and place blame on others, sometimes especially those of us whose hearts burn for justice, but who should know better. I just wish I spoke better French, so that I could absolve their sins with more beauty than English allows.

There are some days that I feel like I’m rewriting transsexual fan fiction of Anne Frank’s diary. Except, it doesn’t seem to be fictitious, and I’m writing far too quickly for me to proofread anything. I try to entrap strangers in transit into bearing witness to what is happening, and I become less and less shocked each time that they are completely unaware of the violence we are facing. I know they will know one day, but so many of us will be gone by then. I will be gone too, but I will be a walking ghost mourning from afar those who weren’t so lucky as I.

People tell me that I can’t save others if I am dead. I bought a piece of Black Obsidian to keep me grounded for what is to come, and I called my mother immediately after to tell her that I love her. We agreed that we will work together to set up bunk beds in the empty rooms of my childhood home to be transitional housing for trans people who can make their way to the border to claim asylum in Canada.

What I wouldn’t give to be back in precedented times.