“That–” He pointed his knife back at her, mouth also full, “is just one reason I’m so fucking happy you’re back home. No one else has a hankering for fish cakes the way me and you do.”
He scrunched up his face in disappointment at the thought. She smiled while finishing her bite. She took a swig of black coffee from an old mug with a Native man dancing as he transformed into a bear on it. Some relic of a 1990s powwow he still had lying around. She set the mug down and tore back into her plate of food.
After shoveling in a few more bites, she looked up from her plate to find her dad still watching her intently. She noticed the new ratio of salt to pepper in his braided long, wavy hair.
She swallowed. “Aren’t you late taking the boat out?”
He was normally out of the house before the sun rose to take advantage of the early morning fish feeding patterns. More activity meant more fish caught. Each fish put him closer to the living he constantly chased.
“Perks of working for myself in a one-man show. I start my day when I want. Plus, I wanted to be here to send you off to work. Don’t get mad when I ask to take a picture of you on the front porch like it’s your first day of kindergarten again.”
She laughed and shook her head. He smiled warmly back at her. She felt at home in a way she hadn’t expected.
“Excited for your big first day?” He asked.
Her face fell slightly. “For the most part.”
He raised his coffee mug to his lips, and peered over it at her thoughtfully before taking a sip and setting it back down.
“I know this is a big move for you. Probably the biggest move you’ve made, if I’m being honest. I always knew you had big plans, and you were just bursting at the seams until you could finally get out into the world and explore. Coming back home is…a change for you.”
“I think this is the exact kind of change I’ve been needing.”
When Rowan first arrived in New York City eleven years ago, she lived in a tiny studio apartment in Morningside Heights across from Columbia University Law School, where she had finally decided to go after mulling over several acceptances. She didn’t have anyone to help her move, or really anything to her name to move in the first place. Despite the buzzing energy of the city right outside her door, she felt isolated in the weeks before classes started.
Most young people experiencing such dramatic change in their lives would have felt homesick. But by that point, she had already spent the last four years self-destructively making sure she burnt every bridge that led back home. She told herself the city, that tiny apartment, had to be home then. So she powered through by hunkering down alone in that tiny apartment and somehow in the process, ended up finishing the reading for the first half of the semester before it even started.
Even though she’d spent weeks dreading it, entering through the law school doors on the first day of class had been exhilarating for Rowan. The school lobby was buzzing with a palpable energy. She approached a large bulletin board with various colorful fliers pinned up across it. Some were advertising upcoming talks from high profile speakers. Others were advertising conferences and travel opportunities. Then her eyes caught sight of a flier with a rainbow graphic and the words ‘Columbia OutLaws’ typed across the top. Intrigued, she squeezed her way past other students to look at it more closely. She scribbled down the meeting information for the LGBTQ+ law student group in her notebook before quickly heading toclass.
When the evening of the first meeting arrived, Rowan was almost too nervous to attend. She had never been good at making new friends and negative self-talk filled her head about why it would be stupid to go, why this would be another failed attempt at finding community. She had to physically will her feet to leave the comfort of her apartment, of her complacency and of her solitude.
After a deliberately slow walk to school, she finally approached the classroom door. The sound of loud, jovial conversation and laughter almost scared her enough to make her turn back. In one last burst of willpower, she crossed over the threshold. Her eyes scanned the room, absorbing everything – how this vibrant space was filled with people of different gender and sexual identities, races, ethnicities, and nationalities.
Rowan had never come out, or seen anyone else come out for that matter. She wasn’t even sure she knew what to come out as. She knew she was definitely queer, and even though she was mostly inexperienced at the time, she could very, very confidently say she liked women. But then that brought up the more difficult, and painful, part for her to figure out. Did she, herself, feel like a woman? The answer to that was more complicated.
She spent a lot of time reflecting back to her childhood and all of the ways she felt she had been forced into this square box of femininity by the people around her, by her culture especially. It was more than being a tomboy, more than the types of toys she played with or the activities she preferred. It was how, culturally-speaking, so many expressions of cultural identity in her community felt overtly gendered. Traditional clothing, powwow regalia, music, every social dance, even children’s games had clear demarcation between women and men, girls and boys. It was hard for her to put in words the overwhelming amount of otherness she felt as a child, but especially as a teenager, with all of the self-discovery and self-doubt that comes with that.
With the support of this new community, she found she did identify as a woman, figured out she did use she/her pronouns. Since then she’d happily existed somewhere intentionally undefined in the genderqueer realm, frequently as a fuck you to the male gaze and gender norms, and always as a challenge to existing power structures. She just didn’t want to be a woman in the ways it had always been expected of her to be. Before this time, she had experienced the very real pain of non-belonging until she found the people who wanted to claim her exactly as she was, until she found herself. Now, she worried she’d given it all up.
She cleared her throat at the sudden flood of memories. She shoveled the last bite of food into her mouth while her dad peered over his coffee cup in what she decided was an effort to decode why she was having an existential crisis in the middle of breakfast.
He canted his head as he sat down his cup. “‘Bout that time I guess.”
She ignored the curious way he inspected her face for signs of what was brewing underneath and resorted to humor instead. “Don’t tell me you bought one of those chalkboard signs, and I have to write how many days old I am and what my favorite food is on it.”
“You gotta let me have a little fun, Ro.”
Rowan chuckled and grabbed their plates from the table.
After physically willing herself again to leave the comfort of a place she knew for one she wanted to know, her nervousness dissipated and excitement slowly emerged in its place. As she drove to her first day at her new job in the old truck she was borrowing from her dad, she took deep breaths and felt a rush of calming energy from the budding oaks and pines that lined her route. Maybe she was ready to do this. Maybe she was ready to learn a new way of relating to her community, this time as a confident adult with a deep understanding of who she was, something she could definitelynotsay was true about herselffifteen years ago.
Rowan took in the freshness and sheer size of the administrative building’s gray stone construction as she climbed the front steps. This was new.Verynew. After getting directions from a chipper older woman at the front desk who eyed her over several times – though she had enjoyed dating older women before, maybe this age gap was a little much – she found her way to Theo Tyler’s office on the first floor and sat down in the waiting area. His office was located within a suite of several executive offices, and she couldn’t help the way her gaze darted around in awe of what it felt like to be in a space like this, that her Tribe built.
“Hey! Rowan – right? How are you?”
Theo greeted her enthusiastically, though flustered, as he walked in for the day, juggling a Nalgene water bottle, a tumbler of iced coffee, and several stacks of paper.
Rowan stood to offer some assistance and motioned toward the paper threatening to spill across the floor.
