Moving on, it was fun!

okay so I fucking love event planning and decorating and hosting and baking, aka all the elements of a banger birthday party. I am so freaking happy to throw people parties because it means I get to throw a party, then go to a party! yippee!

so my friend's birthday rolled around and I knew she wanted a party because I'd done them for her before, but I wanted to make it extra special because she was turning the big 25. so I did all the regular stuff I am So Excited About: had her roommates let me into her apartment while she was out, put up balloons and homemade garlands and streamers and table decor, made her favorite cake and snack plates and cocktails, ordered catering from a restaurant she loves, got a bunch of our friends to come over to surprise her, wrote her a disgustingly heartfelt card, etc. and then because it was the big quarter century, I was like I gotta do something extra.

now. I do not like clowns. my friend loves clowns. we've gone to the circus together and she's seen me literally close my eyes and hide when the clowns are out in the audience, meanwhile she's screaming and waving at them. so obviously I hired a clown for her birthday. (btw seeing him out of clown costume made me less freaked out because now I knew that the guy under there looks like someone's uncle.)

so she showed up after work totally expecting a party because I'm too paranoid to throw a real surprise party, and obviously loved it. and then I was like btw. there's a clown.

she lost her mind. she was sooo excited. she loved the party and she loved the clown. I was like haha yes I'm getting a good grade in birthday parties and didn't think much of it because frankly I do this a lot, and it's so much fun for me that I don't consider it work. like, I love doing all that for my friends. it's not any kind of sacrifice.

two days later, she texted me that she broke up with her boyfriend.

naturally I was like omg tell me everything I hated that guy let's get coffee. so we did and she told me that for her birthday, her boyfriend of nine months 1) forgot about it and didn't get her anything, 2) got mad at her for not texting him while she was at her party, 3) got mad at her for telling him about the party because it was "passive aggressive", and 4) called her immature and stupid for being excited about a clown at her birthday.

no one needs you to protect the inherent assumed cisness of someone who very obviously didn't fit the mold of what cis men are expected to act like, who died far too young and never got the chance to tell us how they identify as, who ended their own life the way so many trans women closeted and otherwise do due to transmisogyny.

“The reason Montana has so few documented sundown towns is because it’s basically a sundown state”

There are almost twice as many Black people in Montana now as there were when I was born - bordering on a whole 0.6% of Montana’s population now. I saw more melanin in two days of playing Far Cry 5 than I did in 22 years in Montana.

Nobody ever warned me that “the sun ain’t allowed to set on niggers in Glendive” or not to find myself alone driving through Roundup. The warnings, always white, were always of Black Eagle or Browning.

It ain’t my ancestors calling out here, and the souls of the ones unlucky enough to find their way into the ground in Montana are lonely and far between.

There’s a strange kind of homesickness, having made it out. I don’t want to move back, but I miss seeing diamond dust falling from the sky in the late spring or early summer, and I know that any return to Montana as a Black transfemme will likely be my last. The moments of surreal, life-changing beauty aren’t worth that very life.

So much of my life has been an absence of choice, real choice, and now that I’ve left I resent that I don’t have the freedom to safely come back. That I’ll likely have to choose whether I want to risk adding my own funeral to whichever parent’s passes first.

You don’t understand how thick the blood is in the Montanan air until you leave and visit again, and find the undercurrent of fear you left behind is even heavier once you have even more marginalizations to contend with. Is it your own yet to come, or just the blood of those like you telling you to get away while you can?

The treasure state won’t miss a couple of coins disappearing, it has far more to hoard for itself, and it knows you’ll be forced to come back some day - they always do, whether they want to or not.

If you get lucky enough, the diamond dust melting on your blood will be the last thing you see.