on the 47 bus going south

It was June of 2023 and I had no idea what I was doing. I was in Philadelphia for the first time in my life for a summer job, and the experience I had in Philly was probably the reason I ended up there a year later. I barely had any friends at the time in the city, with my social interactions basically being three people: 1) someone who would later become my ex-wife (we've never been married), 2) someone who is still my best friend to date, and 3) someone who I met on Mastodon who I am going to the Super Bowl (go birds) party of tonight, and is a dear friend.

I was going to 3's house to watch some anime with her, or maybe I was going to a party at her place. I don't quite remember. At the time I lived in a Drexel University dorm that had cat shit all over it, because I was rooming with people who were in a nightmarish codependent relationship, which I had a tendency to get tied up in between. I wasn't even working for Drexel, but the summer program I was in didn't have the money to pay for UPenn's dorms, so they rented out Drexel's for cheaper. The place fucking sucked and I'm really glad that I didn't have to live there for more than 3 months, even though the city around me was so much better than the alternative of living in Indiana, where I grew up.

Anyway, I hopped on the El at 34th Street Station and got off at 8th Street, and waited for a bus between a Ross Dress-for-Less that no longer exists and a GIANT that I have shopped at exactly one time in my life. The 47 is, notably, kind of unreliable sometimes, and I waited at the stop for way longer than I anticipated. That's not important. Eventually I got on the bus, and I was heading south towards 3's place.

The bus was packed, because of the aforementioned "unimportant" congestion. I headed to the back of the bus and stood there. A major bugbear of mine is that people don't seem to understand that you have to head all the way to the back of the bus, but I always do it. It reduces congestion in the bus aisle, even if you aren't sitting down.

I was dressed like I usually dress; black graphic t-shirt (any graphic will do), blue jeans (sometimes black), and the vest that I wear all the time. It's a denim vest with the sleeves cut off, and various patches plastered in it. One of them says "I don't want to look or be cis", which I sometimes have to actively remind myself of. One of them says "You cannot kill me in any way that matters", which is true. One of them just says "DYKE", black text, red background, frayed edges. All my patches are hand-sewn because I don't own a sewing machine and don't know how to use them.

At the very back of the bus, when the seats press up against the back wall, there were two old men sitting there and looking at me. I didn't really know what they were looking at, I was just dissociating on public transit and barely noticed them. The back seats weren't even entirely full, but I feel awkward pressing up against people sometimes. Regardless, the two old men offered me a seat next to them, and I accepted. I appreciated it a lot, especially because my feet were in a lot of pain. I wouldn't learn that I had chronic pain in my feet until a year later when I was working at Target for like a month. I had to quit that job because of transmisogyny. Also the pain.

I didn't really know why these guys were offering me a seat at the time, though. It felt weird to explicitly do that. After I sat down, one of the men dug through his bag for a bit. He went through a couple of the pockets. I don't remember exactly what the bag looked like; it was a backpack, I'm pretty sure. Eventually he went into one of the front pockets and pulled out this.

It didn't look like this when he handed it to me. The beads were all jumbled up, since it was evidently stuck in his backpack pocket for a while. The cords holding them together were a bit frayed, and the metal (which isn't visible in this photo) was pretty rusted. He said to me, and I'm paraphrasing because my memory's dogshit, "I haven't used this in years, but maybe you can get some use out of it."

I'm a really awkward person in meatspace. I both do and don't like the word "meatspace" because it makes me sound like the protagonist of a William Gibson novel, and it varies as to whether or not I want to sound like that. I'm reading Neuromancer right now, and that book is really racist. But regardless, I didn't really know how to respond. I thanked him, obviously, and just kind of sat there next to him in this vague shock, because I didn't really know what emotion I was feeling at the moment. To unpack it would take me a while. But it was just insane to me, given my sheltered upbringing, to see an elderly gay couple existing and to accept this uppity tranny dyke that was on the bus without so much as a name or introduction.

The two men got off the bus and said "happy pride", and I replied "happy pride".

I started doing math in my head. These guys were evidently at least in their sixties. Given that it was 2023, that means that they've lived through the 80s, at least. These guys lived through Reagan, the AIDS crisis, the Cold War. Probably more than that. And they handed me this.

For reasons that I will not elucidate, I had a belief in my head that the elder queers would hate me. It was a brain worm at best, and I didn't really believe it in truth, but it was definitely in there. In that moment, that belief was proven wrong, and I was finally free from it. I realized then that there have been queer people before me; there have been homos before me, there have been dykes before me, there have been trannies before me. What they fought for was the ability for me to live life the way I currently do. I was grounded in that moment with the history of all those who came before me. I felt tied to a collective in a way that queers under capitalism very rarely get, largely due to the era of individualism wrought by social media and advertising categories pushing a narrative that being queer is about being "your true self" as opposed to finding a sense of connection with other people like you. You can't be queer in a vacuum.

What I realized, then, was that it was my responsibility to fight for future generations of queers to live a better life than the one I am able to lead now. It was my responsibility to become like them, providing these small, fleeting moments of solidarity as I grow older. I never got their names, and I hope they're doing okay.

Over a full year later, I live in Philadelphia now. I moved here living on a prayer, with the sum total of my belongings being two UPS boxes full of clothes and whatever could fit in my friend's sedan. I feel better now, I think. Given recent events, which I do not really want to talk about in this post, I started wearing the bracelet again. It doesn't fit me right, and it never really did. I used to use some cord to hold it together, but now I'm using some jewelery wire that 1 (sorry 2, you aren't in this story) put on it last night to make it fit. I have kept it around either as a decoration or a bracelet in some form ever since I got it. It grounds me, I guess. It's a reminder, like the kind of memento that every character in every B-movie has where they have a "box full of memories". It's definitely the closest thing I have to something like that.

Anyway, back to 2023. I got off the 47 and I walked into 3's place, and we watched some anime. Or I was at a party. One of the two.