The stereo’s spinning again. Not a Bluetooth speaker, not some cold digital stream humming through soulless plastic—but an actual stereo. The kind with physical buttons you can punch down like you’re dialing into a memory. Indigo Girls – 1200 Curfews. Track 12. Closer to Fine. A CD I’ve owned since it came out, and one that never needed an upgrade, because truth doesn’t need remastering.

The house is quiet except for the hiss of the stereo and the bubbling murmur of a small bong, packed with care. One hit. Smooth as satin. No gag, no harshness—just calm. It rolls over me like warm flannel sheets, making peace with every nerve ending I’ve ever set on fire. There’s a stillness here, but it’s not empty. It’s the kind of stillness that carries the ghosts of every version of me I’ve ever been, tucked into the corners like old photographs left out in the sun.

And when that track starts—when Amy and Emily start singing like they’ve known me longer than I’ve known myself—it’s like a switch flips in my chest. Suddenly, I’m sixteen again. It’s 1996. I’m standing on a porch I was never allowed to call home, holding a leash in one hand and a duffel bag in the other. My whole life, reduced to what I could carry and what loved me back.

That’s what this song does. That’s what this moment is. It’s not just nostalgia—it’s resurrection. It’s the unspoken truth that this music, this disc, this particular spin through Track 12, doesn’t just remind me of who I was. It reminds me that I made it. That I fucking made it.

And somewhere outside, past the yard and the river and the edge of my ten-acre Vermont sanctuary, there’s a birch tree. My favorite tree. Beneath it lies the only soul who stayed with me through it all—Penfold, my dog. The only living thing that never asked me to change, never looked at me like I was too much or not enough. The one who sat in the passenger seat of a beat-up ’91 Honda station wagon as I drove away from everything I’d ever known, with nothing but $600 and a spine full of grit.

So yeah, the stereo is spinning. And it’s not just playing music. It’s playing me.

It happened fast. That’s the part people don’t understand—how quickly everything can fall away. One minute you’re standing in your childhood home, still technically a kid, and the next you’re on the outside of a locked door, holding a leash, a duffel bag, and your breath. Sixteen years old. Just old enough to drive, not nearly old enough to deserve what came next.

No tearful goodbye. No sit-down discussion. Just a hard line drawn in the sand by people who never once asked who I really was. They didn’t want answers. They wanted silence. Compliance. Something palatable. Something straight, quiet, grateful, and small. And I wasn’t any of those things—not then, not now.

I stood on the porch long enough to feel the weight of it. The heaviness of understanding that I had been declared disposable. That everything I was—female, queer, stubborn as hell—had finally outweighed their tolerance by not being the son they wanted. I was no longer a daughter, or even their child for that matter. Just a disappointment with a dog.

Penfold looked up at me, his tail wagging like it was just another night, like we were headed somewhere exciting. He didn’t know that the house behind us was never going to open again. He didn’t care about the yelling, or the tears I wouldn’t let fall, or the birth certificate I kept hidden in my dresser drawer like a secret no one wanted to hear. He just wanted to go wherever I was going. And I needed that more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life.

The car was already packed. 1991 Honda Accord wagon, rust creeping like ivy around the wheel wells, the engine smelling faintly of burning oil, and begrudgingly answered prayers. I had $600 in cash, a wallet full of expired library cards, and one duffel bag filled with clothing. Just one. It held clothes that didn’t fit right, a notebook, a toothbrush, and a CD case with the Indigo Girls pressed flat in the front pocket.

The irony wasn’t lost on me, even then. I had been kicked out for who I was—because of who I was—and yet, I was clinging to the music of women who looked and sounded like me. Women who wrote songs about not knowing all the answers. About searching. About surviving the crooked line. And somehow, it didn’t feel like tragedy. Not completely. It felt like a beginning I didn’t ask for, but maybe… just maybe… I needed.

I got in the car. Penfold jumped into the passenger seat like he belonged there. Like it was his job to ride shotgun through hell if that’s where I was headed. And without a map, without a plan, without even knowing where I’d sleep that night, I turned the key. I told Penfold that this time he couldn’t come with me. He looked at me with his big brown eyes, excited at first, then sad when the reality set in that his mother would have to be gone again for awhile.

The engine caught. The wheels moved. And just like that, I was gone.

The open road doesn’t give a damn about your age, your gender, your bruises, or your broken heart. It doesn’t ask where you’re going—it just demands that you keep moving. For me, at sixteen, that was the only requirement I could meet. Movement. Forward. Anywhere but back.

I had nothing except what fit in one duffel bag and $600 I kept hidden in my glove box, hidden and buried under random clutter like it was sacred. That car—a rust-bitten 1991 Honda station wagon—was my home, my shelter, my confessional booth. It smelled like oil, fast food wrappers, and fear, and the radio worked only when it wanted to. The CD player was a lifeline, and 1200 Curfews stayed in rotation like it was stitched to the damn dashboard. Track 12—Closer to Fine—was the only thing in my life that didn’t ask for explanation or apology.

Penfold didn’t come with me this time. And that absence? It was deafening. I kept glancing at the passenger seat, half-expecting to see his eyes blinking up at me, ready for the next adventure. But it stayed empty. There was no wagging tail, no warm body curled at my feet, no breath beside mine when the silence got too loud. Just me and the road. Me and my thoughts. Me and the ache of knowing that even my dog, my dog, the one soul who ever looked at me like I mattered, wasn’t with me anymore. It made the loneliness sharper. More surgical.

The next morning, I pulled into the gravel lot of my old summer camp with the kind of forced optimism that only a sixteen-year-old carrying the weight of the world can fake well. I was bright-eyed, grinning like I meant it, and ready to prove something—to the world, to my father, but mostly to myself. I didn’t show up expecting kindness. I didn’t even expect fairness. I showed up to work. To earn. To stand on my own two feet and say, Look—I can survive without you. I signed on to scrub dishes until my knuckles ached, serve pancakes to kids who reminded me what safety looked like, and sleep in a tent with nothing but my duffel bag and a flashlight that worked when it wanted to.

But if I’m being honest—and I always am, even when it hurts—I also wanted something else that summer. Something soft. Something fun. I wanted to feel normal, even if just for a moment. I wanted to laugh without guilt. I wanted to steal a swim in the lake after dark, walk barefoot in the dewy grass before sunrise, and maybe even flirt with a girl who smiled back like she saw me for who I was. So yeah, I was there to work hard, earn every cent, and justify—at least to myself—any accidental moment of joy that might slip through the cracks.

Because when you’ve been told you don’t belong, the hardest thing to accept isn’t survival. It’s happiness.

On my days off, I parked in grocery store lots, and quiet trailheads, in the forgotten corners of The Adirondacks where no one would notice me. I curled up on the back seat like a ghost haunting her own life. Hunger came and went like an annoying cousin—too familiar to fear. I learned quickly that cold air bites differently when you don’t have a house to warm up in afterward. But you adjust. You always adjust.

I wasn’t scared, not in the way people think. I was raw. I was angry. I was running on fumes, blind hope, and fuel burning fast on an empty tank. And maybe that’s what saved me. Not some deep inner strength, not some predetermined resilience—just the refusal to lay down and let the world win.

Some nights I’d lean the seat back and stare through the windshield like it was a movie screen showing someone else’s life. The Indigo Girls would play, soft and low, Amy and Emily singing like they were sitting right there with me. Telling me that I wasn’t alone. That there were others—queer girls, misunderstood girls, too-loud-too-soft-too-real girls—who had made it. Who had taken their crooked lines and drawn something beautiful.

I didn’t feel beautiful. I felt invisible. But I was breathing. I was alive. I had the keys, I had a full tank, and I had a song that reminded me that not knowing was its own kind of knowing. That surviving the confusion was closer to peace than pretending everything was okay.

The truth is, no one saved me. I did that myself. Not because I was ready. Not because I was brave. Because I fucking had to.

Penfold didn’t make the journey with me that time, but I carried him anyway—everywhere I went, tucked into the quiet corners of my heart like a photograph folded in half and hidden in a wallet. I didn’t need him sitting in the passenger seat to feel him there. I just had to glance at the spot beside me and I’d remember his eyes, the way they used to look at me like I was the whole damn world and not just a girl who’d been discarded.

He came into my life when I still believed there might be room in it for softness. Back before things got hard and stayed that way. He was never just a pet. He was home, wrapped in fur and warmth and wordless understanding. He knew when I was lying—especially to myself. He knew when I was breaking long before I let the cracks show. He’d nudge my hand or rest his head on my knee like he was trying to hold me together.

And he did. Over and over again. What I couldn’t explain to the world, I never had to explain to him. I was intersex, queer, complicated as hell, and still figuring out where I began and where the damage ended—but to Penfold, I was just his. That was enough. That was always enough.

Penfold was with me through the thick of it—the latter part of my childhood, every brutal hallway of high school, the long nights and cheap coffee of college. He was there when I fell in love for the first time and when it all came apart. He rode shotgun when I moved across the state, sat on the porch of my first house like he owned it. Every chapter, he was there, tail thumping, eyes knowing, always just there. Until one day, he wasn’t.

It happened fast, and it still burns.

There was an emergency—one of those chaotic, drop-everything-and-go kind of calls—and I didn’t have time to figure out where he could stay. So I did what I thought was safe. I left him with my parents. Just for a night. Just until morning. I drove back the next day, tired and filthy from the kind of shift that makes your bones ache—and he was gone.

My mother had taken him to the vet and had him put down. No call. No warning. No chance to say goodbye. She decided on her own that his time was up, that he was too old, too sick, too much trouble. She made that call without me. And then she told me like it was nothing.

To this day, I have never forgiven them for that. I doubt I ever will. Some things don’t get stitched back together. Some fractures stay broken—and this one split something deep. Penfold wasn’t just a pet. He was my companion, my constant, my tether to every version of myself that fought like hell to survive. And they took him from me like it was an errand.

That kind of betrayal doesn’t fade. It settles in the bones and waits. When he died, it gutted me in a way nothing else ever has. Not the rejection, not the hunger, not the cold, not even the silence of sleeping alone in a car at sixteen. Nothing prepares you for losing the one soul who stayed. I buried him beneath the birch tree in my backyard—the one I’ve always called my favorite, the one that’s seen the seasons pass like chapters in a book I keep trying to write. I gave him the best I could. A place to rest. A place that felt like home. A place where I could still visit him when the world got too loud.

There’s a birch tree in my backyard that I’ve always called my favorite. Not because it’s the tallest or the most picturesque, but because it feels like it’s been watching over me long before I ever arrived. The bark is thick and weathered, the limbs wide and open like an invitation. It doesn’t flinch in storms. It doesn’t sway easily. It just stands.

That’s where I buried Penfold’s ashes.

That tree holds more than roots, and springtime ribbons now. It holds memory. Loyalty. Love. It holds the echo of every footstep he ever took beside mine, every moment he stood between me and the dark. When I walk out there, I don’t say much. I just stand still and remember the sound of his collar, the feel of his weight curled against my hip, the way he’d tilt his head like he understood the things I couldn’t say out loud.

Some people measure their life by milestones—graduations, promotions, wedding photos. I measure mine by the living things I’ve cherished, loved, and lost. Penfold was the first. The most honest. The one who set the standard. And even though he didn’t make that first solo drive with me, he’s been with me every mile since.

I didn’t have to think twice about it. There was never going to be a shoebox in a corner of someone else’s property or some cold plot at a sterile pet cemetery. He deserved more than that. He deserved roots. A resting place that mattered. A place that could hold him the way he held me all those years—steady, silent, and without conditions.

I dug the hole myself. No gloves, no fanfare, just me and the dirt. I wanted to feel every inch of the work, like maybe if I went deep enough, I could find a way to reverse it all. I laid him down in his handmade wooden box. I said nothing. There were no words good enough. Just the sound of shovelfuls of tear-filled earth, and the breath in my throat that refused to come out.

That spot beneath the pine isn’t marked by anything fancy. A memory I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Sometimes a flower will sprout when the season feels generous. But I visit often. I sit there when the world gets too loud, when people disappoint me, when I start feeling that old weight in my chest that reminds me what it felt like to be sixteen and on my own. And when I sit there, I don’t cry—not anymore. I just remember. I let the wind move through the branches, and I let the silence between us say the things I never got the chance to.

That tree holds him now. And it holds part of me, too. Some people find god in churches. Some find it in music or books or the arms of someone they love. I find it under that tree, in the stillness, in the knowing. That’s where I remember that I was loved once, purely, completely, and without conditions. That’s where I go when I need to remember how to keep going.

Because the world may have tried to strip everything from me, but that tree, that dog, those memories—they’re mine.

The stereo’s spinning again. Same disc. Same track. Closer to Fine. It’s not a coincidence—it never is. The CD is scratched to hell, worn down from years of heavy rotation and glove-box exile, but it still plays like it knows I need it. And today, I do.

The first few notes hit, and suddenly time doesn’t feel linear anymore. The air in the room changes—denser, quieter, like memory is crawling in through the vents. It’s not about nostalgia. I don’t sit around pining for my past. I survived it. What I feel when that song plays isn’t longing—it’s recognition. It’s the sound of a girl who packed her life into a duffel bag and drove off into the dark because she had no other choice. It’s the sound of a woman who’s still here.

And not just still here—but thriving on land she owns, beneath a sky that doesn’t belong to anyone else, with her name on the deed and her fingerprints on every inch of her goddamn life.

I let the song play loud, louder than necessary, because I don’t have to ask permission anymore. I don’t have to be quiet for anyone. I sit back with a fresh hit from the bong, smooth and warm, not to numb anything, but to honor the ritual. To slow it all down. To remember the girl I used to be and thank her for not giving up when it would’ve been much easier to disappear. Because I almost did. More than once.

But instead of fading, I built something. Not perfect. Not polished. But mine. A life where I mow my own grass and fix my own pipes. A life where I can walk out to the birch tree and lay my hand on the earth and feel him there. A life where my survival isn’t a secret—it’s the basis of the entire story.

The stereo hums and skips like it’s remembering too. Amy and Emily sing like they’re still sitting in that passenger seat beside me, singing truths that never needed to rhyme to be right. There’s more than one answer to these questions…

They were right. There always was.

The answer was never my parents, never the paycheck, never the rules handed down by people who didn’t know what to do with a girl like me. The answer was in the crooked road, the rusted car, the camp kitchen, the birch tree, the grave, the grief, the goddamn grit of it all.

And the less I seek my source for some definitive? The closer I am to fine.

There’s no big revelation at the end. No polished moral, no grand epiphany that wraps everything up with a bow. Life doesn’t offer that. Not for girls like me. What I’ve got is realer than revelation—it’s the quiet certainty that everything I’ve survived, every loss, every fracture, every moment I was told I wasn’t enough, has shaped the woman I am now.

I was kicked out at sixteen. Not because I did something wrong, but because I existed too loudly. I loved too honestly. I refused to shrink. And in the years that followed, I stitched together a life from nothing but instinct and defiance. I didn’t follow a map—I drew one in pencil, and smeared the lines as I went. Some paths led nowhere. Some led to pain. But some led home.

Now I wake up on land that’s mine. I open a window and breathe in Vermont air that no one else claims ownership of. I walk barefoot across hardwood floors I installed myself, under a roof I paid for with my own goddamn grit. I keep the duffel bag. I visit the tree. I play the CD. And when Track 12 comes on, I don’t flinch. I don’t cry. I listen.

Because Closer to Fine was never a song about answers. It was a permission slip to be messy, to be searching, to be loud and soft and complicated and queer and still okay. And now, decades later, I know—I didn’t have to be perfect. I just had to keep going.

So, no—I’m not all the way “fine.” That’s not the goal. I’m closer. Closer every day. Closer because I earned it. Because I built this life one decision, one heartbreak, one busted antenna and rusted car at a time. Because I never stopped moving forward, even when no one was clapping.

I’m closer because I stopped waiting for someone else to name me, save me, or fix me.
Because I am not broken. I never was.

And that? That’s fine by me.