There is no other way to say this: I write you now from exile, having (if you are reading this) fled political persecution in my home country, the United (for now) States of America.
I say this plainly, without metaphor or embellishment. The reality of it has stripped even language of its usual protections. The event outpaced any craft or device. What remains is a truth spoken aloud to no one and everyone: I have left.
In the weeks before leaving, I heard it in everything: you can’t take it with you. The wooden furniture built by ancestors who had themselves once fled. My pots and pans. My sister. My parents. The view from my window. The ashes of my rabbits. My orange typewriter. My happy plants. Some of these may find me later, if circumstances allow it.
Others are already becoming memory. In their place: a rain jacket, a small photo album, a geode, multiple pairs of shoes, my maracas, apostilled documents, a passport that I wasn’t able to renew (though I’ll try at the embassy here). And myself, which lately has felt increasingly high-risk to carry.
My leaving was self-preservation. The clearest corridor of possibility. To choose the when and where of your exit route is still to be fleeing.
What does it mean to “choose” to leave, when the available options have been whittled to splinters? What is the function of choice in the context of scapegoating, erasure, and surveillance? I chose nothing—except not to wait for worse. My leaving was self-preservation. The clearest corridor of possibility. To choose the when and where of your exit route is still to be fleeing. “Perhaps home is not a place,” James Baldwin wrote, “but simply an irrevocable condition.”
And elsewhere, of his own flight from the United States: “The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me, they released me from that particular social terror which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.” In my own way, I understood him. I had to stop looking over my shoulder. I left in order to live.
In a legal webinar for trans travelers, attorneys advised us to create safety plans: to establish a check-in for every checkpoint. My desire to bring myself contended with the need to pack nothing that might betray me to a hostile scan or officer. I tried to memorize my rights, labeled medications in ways I hoped wouldn’t draw attention. I carried myself through security with nothing to hide, but everything to lose. This is how to avoid a “groin anomaly” alert. This is how to minimize a physical search. I sent my itinerary to my lawyer.
Do digital nomads feel this way? I think not. But if not, then what is the noun for what I am now? “A borderland,” Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.”
In simplest terms, asylum means protection. Safety. When I was two months into a new dream job as a teen services librarian, police officers came to my workplace and accosted me with a false criminal accusation. During my long fight for justice, a hand-addressed envelope arrived in the mailbox, torn open and empty, scrawled with: You are a fraud. In the aftermath of Trump’s second election, an anti-trans death threat came through my website’s contact form. The week of his inauguration, a stranger shouted nationalist obscenities at me on the street. The sentiment grew louder in its intent—and so did the alarm.
I believed a blue state could buy me more time. I was wrong. The press release listed my doctor’s hospital system as a success story of early compliance with the new executive order. I couldn’t eat. I was physically ill for days. When I finally decided to go, the nausea lifted.
What came with me is vigilance. I packed and repacked in my mind, rehearsing. A voice inside me that had started as a stomachache began to shout: go. It turned into clarity. There are moments when a place you live stops being livable. Sometimes that arrives slowly, like a leak. Sometimes all at once.
Some experiences are marked by thresholds. What I bought on my last grocery trip. What I left in the fridge. The way the sun felt through the window as I let fresh air in, unsure if or when I’ll return. Saying goodbye to my parents’ attitudinal senior cat. I held a notarized affidavit in one hand as if it were a golden ticket, and in the other, the phone—discussing my plans in hushed tones, receiving encouragement, support, kind words.
This is what a migrating animal does when conditions change: They move. Not because it is noble or romantic or bold, but because staying would mean death. It’s not always strategy, not exactly. Sometimes it’s instinct. A reflex honed over generations.
Dante Alighieri wrote, “You shall leave everything loved most dearly, and this is the shaft of which the bow of exile shoots first. You shall prove how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.”
André Aciman wrote, “What makes exile the pernicious thing it is is not really the state of being away, as much as the impossibility of ever not being away.”
Mail key. Smell of the hallway. Sponge in the sink. Dramatic tokens of dislocation. Small things, Aciman says, read in the key of loss.
Grief is not a checkpoint. It travels with you. It gets there first. It sits beside you and does not speak.
In my final week, I took the long way home so I could drive through the heart of the city, windows down, swapping music with strangers. It was a gorgeous day. Singing as I drove, I thought of young Tracy Chapman, twenty-four years old at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday tribute concert, famously filling in for Stevie Wonder after a technical issue—and stunning the world. We gotta make a decision / Leave tonight or live and die this way. I played it on loop.
Leaving is not betrayal. There are still exits besides the one marked death. Some might even lead to life.
I don’t know yet what this other side will feel like. I don’t know what noun I will recognize myself in most easily, or what place might begin to call itself home. I don’t know when I’ll stop measuring time in relation to threat or checkpoint, or if I’ll ever stop feeling so exhausted. I know only that I entered into motion because there was no ground left on which to stand. Because I have writing to do. Because I was not put here to prove I could endure the terrifying, brutal things humans do to each other. Because there are flowers in bloom that need my attention, and loved ones growing older. Because “one wild and precious life.”
The ones who perceive this as exaggeration may have never had to measure their humanity against a policy memo. They’ve never been told their presence in a country was fraudulent, or a threat to national security, simply for existing. They cannot imagine carrying their own body, medication, or name like contraband.
I am not writing this to prove anything. I’m writing because language still belongs to me—and because if you are reading this, then I have not been erased, I am still here.
What I hope is that those still living inside the terror will know: exile is not failure. Leaving is not betrayal. There are still exits besides the one marked death. Some might even lead to life.
So, let this be a dispatch from the in-between. A rooster crowed. The fire came. I jumped from a window, with little more than words in my hand.
What comes next is breath, just that.
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Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf is available from Nightboat Books.