Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
I know I told this story before but last year I was having complications with a surgery and I just broke down in a public place and I was trying to gather myself, sitting and leaning on a wall when this girl in cowboy boots approached me and sat down and she asked what was wrong and I told her it was medical issues and she said “I understand, I have to have my foot amputated next week” and it shocked me out of crying and I was like “wow that sucks!” And she said “yeah.” And then she just touched my arm so tenderly and told me “I promise you that this problem will have its place, and everything is going to work out.” And the way she said it just made me really believe her. She said. “We’re just gonna have to cowgirl up.” And then she stood up and walked away and I’d call that a genuine encounter with an angel but the truth is there is a lot of goodness right here on earth in humanity and it’s shining and pure.
Okay but “this problem will have its place” is genuinely inspiring
THAT REALLY STRUCK ME because I’ve always hated the tired rhetoric of “this happened for a reason” and this feels like a more genuine, comforting take on that. Not “it happened for a reason,” but “this will find its spot in your life and your future that it fits into in a way that will eventually work out even though it sucks that it happened.” Love that.
By nature, I’m a fan of having 2 beers and meeting strangers at a bar somewhere you’ve never been, which is a thing that we don’t do in 2023 between COVID and being afraid of one another because of the prevalence of gun violence and regular violence and misdirected road rage and the million other little deadly social erosions of the past 10 years or so.
You have got to let go of this idea that any place is a complete nothing-burger full of nothing-people.
You have to.
Its vitally important that you navigate that airport with a stranger in Denver and realize he’s got a tattoo of lyrics from your favorite song. To sing House of the Rising Sun with four people you’ve known for 2 hours (and somehow managed to get into the DNCs private bar with) in the back of an Uber in DC when it’s pissing rain and entirely too cold for your southern blood. It’s important to cooperate and solve problems together and go about it laughing and singing. We are silly little creatures that love a puzzle and a story.
It’s also important to flee a tornado in the back of a shitty red pickup at pride in Oklahoma City and feel the sky break wide-open against the lazy /tick-lok/ /tick-lok/ of the windshield wipers while racing down what once was Rte 66. Its important to know that in the face of creeping fascism that place, of all places, has entire gay neighborhoods. It’s important to wake up in an apartment high, high up in NYC and watch the sun through the buildings and boulevards and watch the glorious great goddamn of that impossible number of people all cooperating and all not. To say Hyoo-stun, that way, on purpose just to get a rise of your born and bred NY friend who does NOT think you’re funny but will make coffee for you.
You need to see a beach full of people cautiously approaching and flinching away from a floating, dead horseshoe crab on Tybee Island, Georgia the way any troupe of wild animals approaches an unknown alien thing. Cows in a field, fish in the ocean flinching from a diver. Little children squealing and wide eyed behind their parents legs. You need to be the person that walks out and picks it up and watches the rest of the crowd creep in to investigate.
I don’t get to travel a lot in the way that most people do, when I go to a place it’s usually because something bad has happened there, but I have found it universally true that most people just want to tell you a story or show you a picture on their phone of the craziest thing they’ve ever seen and they don’t particularly care who you are or what your accent is. Sometimes they do, and those people suck, but those people are not the majority.
Sometimes if you let an old redneck talk he’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know about forensic accounting. Sometimes you’ll meet someone in the middle of the biggest city in the US who knows everything about show pigs. I’ve been to the smallest Kansas towns and the biggest cities in the US and I’ve found none of them were full of nothing.
That’s one of the things I love about my bus trips. Stressful and occasionally bordering on traumatizing though they are, I was on a bus home from two months in Pennsylvania and met a girl my age with a service dog who was going to a different part of Oklahoma and she immediately trusted me and we spent 95% of that trip together and then with another girl who was in the early months of pregnancy. We talked and sat and moved together until we had to split. I watched her dog for her while she went to the bathroom and he trusted me too.
I was crying on the bus another time because my headphones broke and I had no cash and an older woman started talking to me because of my punisher hat. She gave me a handful of crumpled ones to buy food before she left on her next bus because I had sat crying in Arkansas thinking I’d be stuck there for a full day.
My first bus trip, a handful of us became layover family after being stuck at the same layover cities for hours. In Philadelphia a black girl got on the bus and called someone saying ‘Hey, are you X’s mom? I just called to let you know I gave your son some sweats because the security guard was harassing him and I didn’t want him to get in trouble’ before she went to sleep. There was a guy in the seat behind me who was talking to his girlfriend about how much he loved her and wanted to start a family and how he and his sister were starting a restaurant that would donate food to the homeless and how his sister was the soul of it.
And beyond all of these people being from nowhere and going nowhere else, people get it into their heads that the place they live in doesn’t have that camaraderie. My mom helped an old man who fell on the curb. I stayed by a car crash that happened in front of me to try and help. A cashier at Waffle House said to not worry about it when we were a few dollars short (that same WH had a waitress named Miss Purple who sang to everyone). A woman gave me a ride home after a day of volunteering in the hot sun and bought me a soda and gave a homeless man a care package and a prayer.
There is not one place on this planet that doesn’t have love in it and that love is shown in the hands that help and the laughs you share.
I met another customer at the craft store trying to repair/remake his mom’s favorite ornament and we figured it out together.
Our waitress the other day got married by accident and had the same name as me.
A stranger approached me at a gas station and said “Jesus wanted me to tell you that it will be okay. You’re going to have a problem with your heart, but it will be fine.” She was, uhh, she was right. It was a totally benign arrhythmia. She was also the first person I gave my new, trans, non-legal name to.
I wear queer and neurodivergent pride pins on my hat and SO MANY people have given me a “me too”, whether whispered or out loud. (That is why I wear them.)
I once sat on a plane next to an elderly woman whose husband had died in a plane crash and wow her attitude was amazing and it was weirdly reassuring to have her there as I was trying not to have a panic attack because we were flying over Nevada and there was a huge thunderstorm under us with red lightning.
I had a really cool conversation with a random patron at an Egyptian burial exhibit about the artists who made the exquisite little miniature grave goods.
The white as milk Midwestern dude at the gas station spoke fluent Tagalog and was a fuckin low key philosophical genius.
I just love people. Their stories, these moments, all the stuff that makes up the web of our social relationships to each other.
Yeah the world is scary, I get spooked in public sometimes. But man, most of it really is just us sharing a wild fucking ride with absolute strangers who for the most part are pretty chill. Pets, kids, music, travel, there’s just about always a way into someone’s good conversational graces. I never get tired of it.
A few years ago, I drew a dumb cartoon on our receipt at a “family” restaurant bc our waitress was having a hard time with some other customers. We soon became her regulars, and eventually we learned she and I had the same bday(years apart), went to the same college, and had adjacent majors. She moved on to a better career but We’re still great friends, and thru her I made other wonderful friends too.
And it started with a dumb drawing and a kind word
In my town there is a bus driver who calls his bus The Magic Bus and will show you magic tricks while waiting at stops. Making coins disappear and stuff, it’s great. He also always says “Have a greaaat day!” over the intercom and sounds like he genuinely means it every single time.
Hey you can cry OK? I am taking my pocket knife and I’m cutting my peach in half and handing you the bigger half. The world is full of things that are worth crying over and it can be exhausting trying to listen to everyone saying don’t cry. And it can be worse trying not to cry because you don’t want bad things to win. Sometimes you gotta just let yourself cry while eating a peach half someone wanted to give you because it was sweet and those things are also in the world too.
A 19 year old passenger with her baby, who only spoke spanish, missed her connecting flight due to weather and would have been stuck sleeping in the airport but my co flight attendant (who spoke spanish) booked her commuter hotel for her and gave her a free room for the night
Another passenger missed her connecting flight home but since she lived just under an hour from me I gave her a ride from dc to virginia beach
My pilot was contacted by the wife of a pilot he’d flown with (who later killed himself) because she’d found a photo of their crew at dinner, so now he takes group photos of every crew he hangs out with, just in case
Another passenger missed her connecting flight and was crying because her mom was in hospice so 2 other passengers who did not know her offered to rent a car and carpool down to jacksonville together
An actor who I will not name but who I’m a huge fan of was in line at the airport pizza place in front of me and my co flight attendant (also a fan) and we were trying so hard to be cool about it and he could tell and he paid for our food because “You all take such good care of us in the air, we should take care of you on the ground.”
The van driver for our new orleans overnight heard me say I was vegetarian but wished I could try authentic gumbo and called his friend who is a chef and then drove us to the restaurant where I was given a creole style vegetarian gumbo he’d improvised
After a terrible night which saw me and my co flight attendant trying for 4 hours to get hotel rooms from our airline, the night clerk at a hotel finally took over the phone call and reprimanded them on our behalf, dictating the exact paperwork she needed sent over and then expedited the process so she could give us rooms
When I was little I showed a flight attendant a picture of a ladybug life cycle I drew myself, and he sat down in the empty seat on the other side of the aisle and drew a flipping plane and holy cow that was the first experience I had of someone drawing and drawing amazingly well. I wonder how he’s doing…
I still have the drawings! And the notebook!
The notebook in question:
The terribly childish drawings in question:
LOOK AT THIS
I DIDN’T EVEN REALISE HE’D WRITTEN MY NAME
Flipping heck 🤣🤣🤣
Oh yeah, this was a Virgin Australia domestic Brisbane to Sydney flight which I’d done with my family multiple times at this point.
Btw I was 8.
Gerome Gardiner, I have cherished this drawing all throughout my childhood, and if you ever see this, thank you for taking the time on a pretty empty flight to draw me something with such beauty that I have carried it throughout my life.
But I feel I should apologise because I have not kept up my drawing skills and neither have I had much time or energy to do so 😅
someone you order from on ebay or whatever putting a handwritten note with the item for no reason at all except to sincerely say thank you and hope it arrived safely
good GOD when they do that and also include additional stuff like stickers or candy or another random item you did not order but they assumed you’d like “just because”…..
Okay, not to be overdramatic but this is one of those things that makes me feel so in awe and in love with people. OP spent their time making this?? And it’s delightful?? And full of compassion and curiosity about strangers on a hellsite. Take what you need, take a breath, enjoy this shared moment of human experience. I did. 💜
the worst part of my job (standing around at college orientations being Visibly Queer) is when parents nervously alter their entire walking trajectory to stay out of range as if I’m going to bite them and pass on my infectious homosexuality.
this is wildly eclipsed by the best part of my job, parents who are such wildly enthusiastic allies that their children seem a little embarrassed about it. I’m talking parents who eagerly point out my little rainbow-draped table and urge their kids to come over, parents who excitedly pick through my button box offering up the relevant pride flags and pronouns to their kids, parents who have detailed questions about harassment policies and gender affirming care while their kids are trying to wander away, parents who rush over with open arms and obvious glee on their faces knowing there’s a space on campus dedicated to keeping their kids safe.
the ferocity with which these parents love and affirm their queer kids is so humbling and wonderful.
a lot of people have asked how I manage not to cry during all of this, and the answer is that I’m a stone cold bitch. but this morning there was a parent who came by the table with a very flamboyant, visibly queer child and then circled back alone to very seriously ask me whether their child will be safe on campus. they shared that their kid has been the target of a lot of harassment throughout high school and that they’ve been praying for their kid to find a community that will provide unconditional love and acceptance, and I will admit that one mcfreakin broke me.
