CITY OF ROSES

Many years ago, when I was 21 years old, I met a woman named Cleo. His style was a careful, selective mix, a curation now that I can only describe as a trans dyke that takes on more pain, but is still a dyke. She was wearing a long black hoodie with a red trunk and dots sewn with floss. Bright red lipstick and a nose ring large enough to injure a person. He had black hair and blue eyes.

This was a time when I knew no one like me. We were on the bus to town. He was holding a water bottle in one hand and whispering his phone in the other. I was in the backyard, where I was looking at him. He came down from Old Town, and I went down, and I followed him and said, "Hey!"

His shoulders tightened before he could turn. He softened when he saw me.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Hello."

“Hello? Do I know you?"

"It's possible. Sorry, this is weird. Are we sisters?"

The internet taught me that move.

He finally smiled at that moment. "I think we are." He shook my hand and sent me a nice hand. "My name is Cleo."

"I'm Nicole." We looked at each other badly. She is of age. You meet someone with a pariah weirdo mold that looks like yours, and you try to reach it, but be careful, because what if you hate each other, or what if he sucks - and, what if the person watching the two of you alone would not be available? That thinking was very close back then, partly because of the bullfight and because of a good reason.

Cleo said, "Do you want a drink?"

I drank from his water bottle (vodka) and put it back and he drank it. And her body seemed relaxed. I could see electricity running through his veins.

The next thing I remember, we were walking through Burnside Bridge. He asked, “How old are you?”

“Why do you care?”

"Because you're beautiful, that's why."

That's when, right there, I didn't know I liked the sound of women's voices. I remember the exact cadence of how he said it. Remembering this sentence would make me look back for years that could have been stolen, with no capital. A little stretch at the end, dipping the tone in the middle of the sentence. Not all of us speak the way he does. But some of us do.

“Do you want me to be old or young?” He laughed. “Okay, that's scary. Let's talk about something else. ”

“I'm exactly 21 years old. How old are you? "" Oh, "she said." Girl, she's older than you. "

He led me to an old Central Eastside warehouse with an offiCe by QuiDAtors painted on the front with three feet. Cleo walked in the open door. "Follow me."

We walked through the lighted corridors. We heard the voices of people at work, fainting and far away. Cleo came up the flight of stairs, and suddenly we were in a cave, sloping. It was like a large teaching hall, but it was full of desks and folding chairs, and cabinets.

"Check it out!" He smirked and looked back. His coat fell off his shoulders, and the light made him a great shadow on the wall. We were up and down. "Turn around," he said.

There was a large window on the other side of the room that occupied the upper part of the wall, facing the center. Toward the end of the day, the concrete slammed into the light. You could not see the sky on the other side of the river.

“This is great,” I said, surprised.

"She's beautiful," he said. He said in a whisper. He said without looking at me. He then said, "Do you want to comment?" That was one of the first things for me: the idea you can ask. We were a little refreshed, sweet, and I felt for the first time that someone else’s body relaxation was good.

Later, in the dark, we walked to the cemetery from his water bottle, and, with everything in it, a rolling office chair sitting in the middle of the road. He pushed her inside and said, “Push me!” I pushed her down until the chair came out and she fell on the grass. I got in and he pushed me, hooting all the way to the road.

We passed a woman wearing the cleanest, most beautiful shirt in an empty, bright store. She was putting racks on the wall with her front door open. Cleo asked, “What are you doing?” and a woman in a black shirt said, “I put it in my shop. I will sell clothes! ”

Cleo pressed me until it was light, and I got up and kicked the chair around the door. "I'm drunk!" I said in surprise. A sigh of grief over Cleo's face. "Yes," he said. "I have an impact on people."

He led me to the backyard full of purple lights and I went to the separated garage. Inside: concrete floor and no roughness, clothing, and local heating, and bed with a sleeping bag with a blanket. He turned on the heater and said, "Come here."

He grabbed me by my legs straight up and gathered me into one of his arms.

The next morning, she took me home to make breakfast. There was detritus all over the kitchen area and a bookshelf full of gay shit and mass-market sci-fi. In the living room, there was a temporary bench press, above which was a Sharpie’d symbol: I AM QUEER MUFF-DIVING SPARKLE GLITTER FAGOT AND PROUD.

I approached her to kiss her as she beat the eggs. He kissed me, and suddenly he grabbed me by the hair and leaned me on the stove with his hands on my robe and, God, it was so hot, I cried, then apologized and gave it to me, it was very hard and he said, "Sex is allowed in this house."

I had to work after dinner, and at noon I found myself on a bus heading north to the city smelling like cum and oil, looking out the window at what sounded like a different world.

We reunited before he split the city. He was already drunk and we went to the old nickel arcade. We have a hoot. He ruled pinball. The next morning, he put on country songs while we slept in bed. The man and woman were singing together and it was fun. Punks love the world! Lots of them, huh? I have some good memories of that.

Cleo stood up and told me to wait. You also have breakfast in bed, and ugh, how fun that is, isn't it? But - it set me free. I do not know. I was attracted to him, I liked to be alone and I liked sex, but I never felt anything. What I couldn't say.

You may recall that I did not always understand how a person reacts to romantic attachments.

I ate beans and eggs, and then I got up and said, "I have a job!" even though my shift didn’t start ’until one.

As I get dressed, and the heater rumbles, Cleo says in a sobbing voice, "Can you ... Can you just hug me a little?"

Cleo had given up the strength and confidence to the point, the strength and confidence I had given her unknowingly. (Here's the secret: I was worried my name was boring, but do you know why I like it now? No one overestimates a Nicole.) I took off my clothes and went back to bed and felt her body empty while mine left the room.

He said, "We intend to be kept alone, you know," returned his assurance.

He left town a few weeks later. He was one of those people that did that, he has swept away. How he solidified his life together, I do not know. But before I left that day, Cleo burned that country album for me. I later found out that it was Robert Plant and Alison Krauss who made the covers, and I thought about Cleo every time I listened to her, even though I would never see her again for twelve years.

You know everything that happens to me, or some of you, anyway. I fell in love with a boy, a little boy from Lake Oswego whose purity and sweetness equal his eighteen years. He had recently left his family and the Mormon Church, and we had long been engaged. He moved a bit to my room while we were together. He was a magic boy. It is good to fix things. Twice, he bought me food while I was literally asleep, tired from work. He was a good boy. We were both made for a different life, except that I can't go back, and he knew, and in the end, that's what he did.

I moved to Lloyd after that. I didn't know what else to do. He sent that he was looking for someone to live with, and I replied, suddenly, I was living with him.

I called him, by the way, and news about you. He was always thinking of you in love, always, I want you to know.

One night, I went out to dinner with Lloyd and his girlfriend at Marie Callender. I told them I was talking to this Canadian boy online.

Lloyd said, “Your grandfather was not born in Canada or something? Can't apply for citizenship by that? ”

I said, "Yes, New Brunswick, but I don't know."

Lloyd rejected it. “How many people love you!” - paused - "I mean, in your case, can you offer an arm to get up and go to Canada?" The provinces had just begun to finance the provision of land, and Lloyd knew I wanted it. (Lloyd asked me about a very minor surgery.)

I didn't have a good answer. His girlfriend put her hand on his arm. “Sweetie, this is her home. Maybe it's not so easy. ”

That night, after a nap, before I went to bed, I started to cry. (Very sad calm.) I stumbled over myself and thought, You're right. Shameless self-promotion for Ballistic Products and a great bargain on a neat little knife for you. When will it happen again?

I can't really believe that. From time to time you are given an exit, something you did not plan for, something you did not deserve, and something you do not believe you can rely on. So you don’t take it. Finally, I realized: It doesn't matter. No one deserves anything, really. I was on a plane the following year.

I lived in Edmonton with that guy from the internet for a long time. He was working on a camera at a news station, he was obsessed with city planning; he had something to arrest and he thought that was too much and I liked that about him. And his parents - ugh - were good souls, rebels from a small Mennonite town. They offered me a place in their family without question, and they were incredibly kind. That was a good few years. I built a life in that city, and yes, I found my womb. I could have stayed with that boy forever, but one night, when the wind blew the whistle outside, he looked at me in the yellow light of the kitchen and said, "I've been seeing someone."

I looked for a job to get me out of town, anywhere away from him. The publishing company here had a paid internship, and I jumped on it, and they kept me. I've been here for a while. Cleo came back to my life last year.

Cleo has been part of this network that I have only seen online, a network of women walking around and dating and dating. She lived in LA, working as a midwife, but one day I saw pictures of her in a picnic in Chicago with other girls in sundresses, and all of a sudden I saw pictures of her in Tennessee, girls wearing leather shorts and shiny and carrying masks.

This is not to say that I wanted what I thought these women had. I knew the life I wanted and the life I didn't want. I mean, like, when Cleo texted me last November, to say she was here, she got stuck, and could she hit me? As a matter of fact, after all this time, this was the context I would see again.

I was walking home by the river when he sent a message. The air was fast and cool. There was a bullet in my passport, explains Cleo. They just let me go but my bus left in the last few hours.

I told him I was near the tunnel; I would be on my way. He said, What is your compliance with the bars?