Chapter 2 #2
She opened the door and stared at the four blank white walls.
Where others might feel this was sterile or uninviting, she came alive with thinking of the opportunities.
She took inventory of a round, communal table in the center of the room and a desk with a computer in front of the large back window.
She peered into the storage room, which was completely vacant.
One of her first orders of business would be expending funds to outfit the space with all the necessary supplies to house a fully functioning program office.
She powered up the computer and logged in for the first time. She scanned her email for anything new since she had checked it last night. She couldn’t stop checking her email. She couldn’t stop looking at her official email handle. Too excited. Too much to look forward to.
Even though her path wasn’t what she had always, or ever, envisioned for herself, she was brave enough to wake up everyday and keep trying.
Gloria was right – she hated being called resilient.
But this was the pay off of that relentless tenacity.
Her opportunity to rewrite the narrative of her life.
The final curve of her redemption arc. And today was going to be the catalyst for the rest of her life. Of that, she was sure.
◆◆◆
Earlier that morning, Rowan was paralyzed in front of the mirror in the tiny bathroom of the house she grew up in.
“Rowan, you up?” Victor called from the kitchen at the back of the house.
“Yep.” She called out.
She pressed her hands into the edges of the sink and leaned her tall slender frame forward as she stared blankly at herself in the mirror.
What the fuck am I doing back here?
She asked herself, hoping for a different answer this time. An answer that would finally shut up her inner monologue that had kept her awake until 2am. Anything that would help get her body finally moving out of the bathroom.
“Come eat breakfast.” He called out again.
“Yep,” she sighed out to herself.
On her way to the kitchen, she stepped back into her childhood bedroom where she had tried, and failed, to sleep the night before.
And the seven nights before that since she’d been home.
She grabbed the pair of black lace-up brogue shoes she’d beaten in over the asphalt of New York City over the last couple of years and debated grabbing the matching navy blue suit jacket to the pants she had on.
Too much?
Probably.
Among many other personal characteristics she felt made her stand out like a sore thumb in her community, she certainly didn’t want to give the appearance of being too conspicuous about the money she had made as a lawyer.
Even though she was averaging sixty hour weeks at her advocacy start-up and wasn’t working in anything close to corporate law that paid the big bucks, she still made a lot more than her dad.
And most other people in the community for that matter.
That wasn’t exactly the kind of first – or back again? – impression she was hoping to leave.
She left the jacket where she’d laid it out over her desk chair earlier that morning and made her way to the kitchen. Less was more.
“Dad, you didn’t have to do this.” She looked down at the plate of fish cakes and over easy eggs sitting on the tiny two-person table under the back window of the kitchen.
“Yes, I did. It’s your big first day. Now sit with me and eat up, baby girl.”
She sat down with him, inhaled the decadent and herbaceous scent of freshly pan-fried fish cake, and sliced into an egg.
The liquid gold yolk dripped out, and she used her knife to slather it on the overloaded bite of cake she’d piled on her fork.
She couldn’t even finish chewing her bite before groaning at how good it tasted.
“That–” She pointed at her plate with her knife, “is a perfect fucking fish cake.”
“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 to class.
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.