It was the first flight I ever missed. The night before, one more beer with Claudia cascaded into an anthem of one more, which I sang with giddy hoping she might kiss me. But Claudia was not the kind of person to cheat on her girlfriend and instead we talked about her thesis and the one I never finished. Before I rebooked my journey that same morning, first I bought a plane ticket heading back to Melbourne by mistake. A return ticket without an outgoing one, instantly I thought it meant something. 

Where I went translated into me selecting the maximum, but still free, radius on a selection of dating apps. Swiping out of options for a month within minutes. Thus my introduction into rural queer experience. 

Tasmania’s capital, Hobart, is the last stop before nautical excursions set off for Antarctica. And I lived a few hours drive away from there, without a car, having lied about that part to get the job. So they gave me a dinky electric scooter to ride the single road 30 minutes to work, an hour to groceries, and a bit more to the national park’s curves of beach where you could be the most alone I’d ever been. Never sure if I was on the same stretch of sand twice, I reread Orlando and experimented with being topless seaside. Which turned into pretending it was a crowded beach and being just in just shorts was how everyone expected me to be. Because of how good it felt, briefly I’d believe it. That was the start of believing there might be a body for me to be in. This isolated freedom being my next revelation of rural queerness. 

My soon to be co-worker picked me up from the airport after I missed the driver our employer had scheduled by eight hours sharp. Before we headed out to the coast, my new ride insisted we both do a big grocery shop. The stores near our work are expensive and not well stocked, she said. I was learning. In the sticky financial wake of rebuying that flight, my card got declined at the counter and my ride spotted me without a question. I never paid her back. I wish I could remember her name. 

Where we worked, no public transit could get you direct. There was a bus route with two connections, which made the three hour drive a full day journey. The only time I tried it, the last bus didn’t show up for an hour. I sat on the curb waiting with memories of hiding behind blackberry bushes so the nuns wouldn't make me fold their laundry until my parents remembered pick up time. Because she was dressed in the same amber brown as the landscape of red dirt, or maybe because I was back in the blackberry bush, our hands were already clasped when first I saw the bus driver.  Her name was Jerry. She was butch, she was handsome. So much so I could barely listen as Jerry explained something about the schedule, how for a ride it’s better to call or knock on the orange cottage right there. She drove me right to my doorstep in the dark. Meanwhile, I learned the backseat of a butch driver’s bus is the safest place in the world. Why’d you come here all alone? I’m trying to figure that out. She smiled, laughed, looked like she wanted to tell me something, or maybe remembered someone, but just nodded and drove into the night with two honks to say goodbye. Just like my dad. 

So my main form of transportation became that scooter, which I shared with my flatmate.

She had also lied about plans to purchase a car after settling in and I liked her immediately. Even more when she continued on from initial introductions to explain that her ‘real’ name was not Selly but it would be the only one I’d know her by. When I left the job six months later, we left together. Each fabricating our own urgent impetus for departure that did not include the music festival we were going to in Melbourne. On the way out, we stayed two nights at a brothel turned b&b. Selly and I journaled side by side on a four poster bed with red velvet curtains. It’s likely I was a bit in love with her, the intensity of our mutual reliance akin to a constellation of my chapter-like friendships with women before and well after coming out. So many pictures without a frame. 

Baths, books, beers, boobs: the interest section of my dating profile while living in Tasmania, a pile of alliteration that sounds like begging now. Though individually the list components do reflect that mind’s foreground: long baths while Selly slept till 2pm; books carried from Montreal covered in the world’s most southern sand; the conveyor belt of stolen craft beer cases Selly procured by flirting with brewery staff; the boobs I hoped to encounter and the careful curation of brief situations in which I did not encounter my own. 

Most of the staff lived five minutes down the road from us in a loop of cabins, their site a visual transplant of my Christian summer camp. Selly and I were in the new residence. We had locals as neighbors and this pleased us both, not to live where everyone gathered in a rec room. Ours was an apartment sized bungalow, big windows, the beach a six minute walk away. A widely spaced picket fence, chest high, partitioned our backyard from the neighbors along which I’d sit and read while their horse stood looking into the distance, looking at me. I named her Emily. So Dickinson in her slanted gaze. Kids would ride her in the afternoon, and she threw off almost all of them. Her name during those times was Majestique, which was just wrong. 

Our last day in Tasmania, Selly and I hiked to a seaside cliff nearly brutalist in its composition of towering granite shafts. Tolkien must have come here once. Out of relentless waves, gray columns rise to the height of the Empire State Building where we sat with our feet dangling over the edge and beer we didn’t buy in our hands. The kind of landscape that made it hard to figure time’s passing. To beat total darkness, we ran back to the rental car for two hours as night fell deeper. No flashlight, no food, a little beer. For energy, we sang. Now is when I tell you Selly is German and we sang in different languages, maybe the same songs but neither of us sure, both slightly tone deaf. But there must have been something in what our voices synthesized because Selly and I talked our way out of a speeding ticket driving from the park to the b&b that night. Our finale.

Three months later, my phone is stolen at a rave while I danced with Sabine after not talking for the year I was gone. Back in Montreal. All my pictures from Tasmania were on that phone. Most of what I saw there, I saw alone. No one could replace those photos, though there was some balm for the burn in a handful of shots from Selly. Sometimes it feels like I never lived there. Despite the rural work, I still had no money to replace my phone and lived without one happily for two months. I didn’t even buy my new one. Sick of throwing rocks at my window to call me, Sabine gave me her old phone — a gesture you could easily pretend to be romantic and I did so exactly.