New Moon, New Year, No Rules
ONCE UPON A time, my second husband and I drove around the country looking for real estate. We even moved a couple of times in our quest—thinking that once we stopped failing to own a house, everything else in our lives would fall into place.
Currently, I’m writing this from the driveway of a house in Ashland, Oregon, that he bought recently with his wife. My house is parked next to his house, where I’m filling up my water tank and charging up house batteries that aren’t getting enough solar power during these cold, dark days. Down the street, there’s a house we made an offer on together seven years ago, even though there was a foundation issue that would be exorbitantly expensive to fix. The roots of the massive old redwood in the front yard were shifting beneath it, setting the whole structure off-balance. The tree—the first tree that ever talked to me—showed me in a dream that I wasn’t meant to live as a wife in that house, now that I was alive in a time with different options. It told me not to buy it.
I tried to anyway.
The place had been on the market for some time, and we matched the owner’s asking price. But suddenly, she told our realtor, she decided not to sell.
Last time I was here in town, the foundation was being entirely redone. The tree and its roots had been ripped out.
HERE’S WHAT I know about new moons—and it’s not a lot, for a witch: They’re about beginnings.
Right? Before I double-fact-check what I already know, I can feel in my blood-memory how stirred up I get as full moons approach, a windup before a release that I forget happens monthly, until my cat starts to leap batshit around our little traveling abode and I wonder what the fuck is wrong with him. Then I look at the cute lunar calendar I’ve hung on the fridge every year since I moved in, and I’m reminded: A full moon approaches.
An ending, a completion. The culmination of a cycle, with the attendant clenching before that cycle lets go.
New moons are their opposite. They are harbingers of fresh starts.
“Do you have an address?” the intake person at the new food bank I went to a few weeks ago asked. I loved this question. It is an entirely different question than “What is your address?” which states as strongly as it asks anything that I should have one. I was both so appreciative of and so taken aback by the phrasing—this culture is so address-centric—that my body took over my speechlessness and just shook my head.
“Okay,” the person said, moving on.
Gabriel Mac
This December actually had two new moons, which made the one on December 30 a “black moon,” the new-moon equivalent of the “blue moon” that describes a second full moon in a month.
I may not have an address anymore. And one of the kids on the farm I recently left said I don’t have a “real house.” But going forward, I’m going to call myself “radically housed” instead of “homeless.” I’ve been on the fence about the latter term since it was assigned to me by social services, which, like most city ordinances, doesn’t consider my home a home. I thought there might be some value in using it, like taking back “queer.” I think it’s possible—though not at all probable—that “homeless” (or at least “houseless”) might someday get there, but right now, for me, it doesn’t land as empowering in the way that “queer” does. “Queer” feels so destigmatized to me at this point that it’s come all the way back around to being a compliment.
“Straight gays,” we queers who live outside of normative systems call the ones living inside them, often cis, white, and wealthy, but always functionally apathetic. Ones who have social and financial capital and who don’t, in any way, work against oppressions and discriminations affecting the still queered queers, for there are lots of kinds of queer it’s not culturally acceptable or advantageous to be. These days, I can consider being a “queer gay” a badge of honor, the “queer” acknowledging the wildness and strength of being a less-abled, trans, family-separated, non-traditionally housed, below-poverty gay—though for years into my transition, I would have given anything to be one of the straight ones.
If I’m being honest, I would sometimes still.
Gabriel Mac
Two nights ago in Ashland, where I once tried with every DNA strand of immigrant Midwestern work ethic to stay in a cis-seeming body and marriage, I found a quiet street. I parked, pulled the vase of fresh flowers from where I’d stashed it for transit and put it back on my table, and lay down in a bed piled with good linens under the flickering faux candlelight of a super-cute campers’ lantern. There were lo-fi beats playing quietly over a rechargeable speaker; there was low-cost sparkling pink organic wine in a glass on the nearby shelf. I have leftovers of this awesome chicken salad I made with canned chicken and capers from the food bank in the fridge. I have propane in my tank that’s keeping my central heating running. My floorboards are cracked and coming up, as well as my kitchen counter in some places. There are so many slats missing from my blinds.
I wasn’t allowed to be there, and don’t really have anywhere to go. Not beyond a friend’s driveway in Washington for a few days.
There are so many contradictions, including in the very freedom of it. Sometimes it fills me with lightness and elation. Other times, fear. Often both. “Homeless” rarely bears any coolness or broad prestige—go ahead and imagine introducing yourself this way. These past two years (I’m about to hang up my third lunar calendar!), I’ve worked on destigmatizing and reclaiming the word for myself, but the cultural edge against it is still so strong, even with my cool decorations and prestigious background, that at the moment it doesn’t help my struggle for high self-esteem among never-ending anti-transness and incest denial and enduring homophobia, especially against the “wrong” kind of gays.
It took more than two years of transitioning before I consistently felt how beautiful it is to walk in this trans body. Actually, it started sometime a little after three.
Saturday night, I walked out of what must be the most affordable and accessible hot springs on the West Coast, where you can also park an RV overnight for $25 ($40 for full hook-ups). After soaking in the hot outdoor pool in the driving rain, I saw my house across the parking lot, the faint, cozy light I left on for Thomas glowing through the windows. And I thought, I want to go in there. I’d love to go in there.
“In there” is exactly where I was going.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
A FEW DAYS before Christmas, I left Northwest Washington for Southern Oregon, where I was meeting my friend Katie from San Francisco. On the way down, I stayed overnight at the trucks and RVs side of a rest stop, among long-haul truckers and other full-time-vehicle dwellers—who I recognize now at a glance.
I’d never stayed all night before. It always struck me as loud and unpleasant and a little scary. But like everything else, it’s only scary until it isn’t.
“I just spent like an hour at a truckstop where I’m spending the night in Oregon,” I texted my friend Seth, “sitting in my house in my underpants and a hoodie glueing rhinestones to my nails while drinking Manhattans.”
Earlier, I’d stopped at a different one for lunch and seen that Katie had texted to ask if I’d already made it to Ashland.
“Actually, I’m at a rest stop somewhere, not sure where, where I stripped down to my panties and got in bed to eat a turkey sandwich lying down,” I texted back.
She responded: “I love your life.”
“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I’m feeling it pretty hard right now myself.”
This New Year’s Eve, on the heels of this rare new moon, I’m headed to a parking spot up on a hill I used to walk almost every day after my second husband and I separated, when I spent every waking minute panicking about how the actual fuck I was going to be trans. Look at what you did, a giant cedar on lower ground in the same park beamed at me the other day, when I leaned against it.
Up at the spot where I’m headed, where I want and intend to spend the night, there are NO OVERNIGHT SLEEPING signs posted every few feet, and I’m scared of this, too. Less literally, there have been NO TRANSITIONING and NO HOMO and NO ORIGINAL/AUTHENTIC LIVING signs posted throughout my whole life, of course.
You just have to live YOUR life, the cedar said, because I need reminders still. Not A life.
My life.
Not a life as anyone else has defined it.
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