“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”
—Emily Pratt Slatin

There are days—quiet, ordinary, well-behaved days—when everything is working just as it should. But somewhere in the periphery, somewhere behind the steady cadence of utility and discipline, something far more primitive stirs: the ache to remember who I am, beneath all of it.

And when I need to remember, I go back.

I return—mentally, emotionally, spiritually—to summer camp. To the breathless air of late July mornings, cool and heavy like a wool blanket soaked in nostalgia. To the sound of pine needles under my boots and the giggle of girls on the path ahead of me. I return to the way the lake looked at 7:00 a.m.—mirror still, the fog resting low and unmoving, like it, too, was reluctant to start the day. I return to the girl I was when I first learned how to say “this is mine”—not in the material sense, but in the way you claim a feeling as your own. Independence. Belonging. Identity. Me.

I remember it all so vividly that it still stings. The creak of the mess hall screen door. The way we tied friendship bracelets like it was holy work, each knot sealing some sacred promise. The way we passed around a magic marker and wrote our names in the bunks, as if time itself would make an exception for us. That was the first place I was seen—not as something to be corrected, or molded, or silenced, but as a whole and wondrous contradiction of a girl. The girl with the quiet voice and the defiant eyes. The girl who always carried a camera and a pocketknife, who built forts in the woods out of stubbornness, and fished snakes out of the canoes because no one else would. I was always that girl. I am still that girl.

But somewhere along the line, something changed. The very same girls who once braided my hair with clumsy fingers and whispered secrets under flashlight moons became the grown women who looked at me like not with rage or malice—instead, it was indifference. The slow erosion of acknowledgement. The silence that swallows every attempt at reunion, every hopeful message, every “Hey, I miss you.”

They don’t say it outright, of course. They don’t have to. But I’ve been around long enough—and through enough—to recognize the particular sting of being discarded. It’s quiet. Clinical. Cowardly.

It wasn’t just the fact that I was different. It was that I dared to live out loud as myself. That I refused to lie, to pretend I wasn’t born with contradictions that made people squirm. That I stopped explaining myself to those who wouldn’t listen anyway. It was easier for them to pretend I didn’t exist than to reframe thirty years of memories through the lens of someone they never truly bothered to understand.

That’s what breaks me the most. Not the shunning. Not the cold shoulders. Not even the outright ghosting from people who once called me sister, soul-twin, forever-friend. No. It’s the realization that maybe they never really saw me. Not then. Not now. Maybe they never actually knew who I was—they only accepted the pieces of me that didn’t challenge their version of reality. The sarcastic, flannel-wearing, fearless, camera-wielding daredevil—she fit the narrative. But the intersex lesbian with the bulletproof sense of self? The one who still loves the woods and still wears blue nail polish like a middle finger to every expectation? She’s a problem.

What a thing it is—to be remembered only when you’re convenient.

I’ve lost count of the things we throw away in this life. Relationships. People. Entire versions of ourselves, shed like snakeskin and forgotten like campfire smoke. We do it because we’re scared, or because it’s easier, or because facing the truth of someone else’s existence means having to question our own. But the carnage of it—it’s staggering. And most people don’t even look back. They don’t pause long enough to examine the wreckage. They just keep walking.

But not me. I look back. I remember. I always remember. I remember the girl I was, with a compass around her neck and a map in her heart, charting a course through the endless woods of Upstate New York. I remember the friends who once swore we’d never grow apart, who now can’t even muster a text maybe once or twice in a lifetime. I remember what it meant to be chosen. And I remember what it felt like to be left behind.

And somehow—despite it all—I’m still here. Still growing pine saplings at the edges of my farm field. Still wiring my own damn electrical circuits because I don’t trust anyone else to get it right. Still loving with my whole of my heart and soul, even when it’s unreciprocated. Still believing in the girl I was, and the woman I am today, even if no one else does.

I’m still me, and maybe the most radical thing I can do now—the only thing left to do—is to keep showing up as myself. No matter how inconvenient that might be for anyone else. Because somewhere out there, another girl might be sitting on her own porch, wondering if she’s the only one who remembers what was promised in the campfire smoke. Wondering if anyone else still mourns what we lost when we chose silence over truth. Wondering if it’s okay to be herself even when the world keeps pretending it never saw her.

To that girl, if she’s out there—I see you. And I haven’t forgotten.

Written from the familiar perch of my pine-shadowed front porch, where even the wind feels like it remembers who I used to be.