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    Somewhere in the Panhandle north of Dumas, Texas, a week before January 20, 2025, a minivan occupied by enough supplies for a week (hopefully), an orange cat (panicking), and two transsexuals (weary) sped down the snow-covered highway (moonlit). Considering the external circumstances, they were driving in the wrong direction: south towards Dallas. The social media slot machine tells a story of shared moments of resistance, despair, horror, and denial. It is stitched together from maps of states colored for how bad their anti-trans laws are, notes app screeds about survival and donation links for escape plans. If you spend enough of your free time pulling that lever it distorts your reality; life has a way of yanking you out.

    The vague panic of what was coming commingled with the sudden trauma that brought our family into that wasteland. A call earlier that morning: “Dad was found unresponsive. I need you to come home.” Hardly any time for tears: solution-oriented. It felt eerie to frantically pack up a car. Recent conversations about bug out bags and “the camps” flooded my mind as we filled the rental with important documents, mini-dresses, hair products, and many more laptops, books and boots than two people could possibly need. It felt like practice for the real deal. Would we remember everything when it was for real? Would it feel like this? Will the checklist we made be useful then? How could this happen?

I'll be alright, I'll be alright /
I take the long way home /
Shaking the bottle and letting them roll /
'Cause the devil I know /
Is the devil I want

     After passing through Dumas, my girlfriend decided to get some sleep in the back. For the first time in 12 hours, I sat in silence. Whenever I drive through Texas alone, the same old memory bubbles up. During a childhood trip to Colorado, I discovered a pool that was covered by a winter tarp. Curious about how it looked under there, I gently lifted it up and slid between its sharp edges into the freezing water. I ignored the pain and swam through the dark. The further away I got from the wall the more that shady blue became the abyss of the ocean. It was eerily peaceful and familiar. Halfway to the other side my asthmatic lungs began to cry out. It was too late to turn around. I forced myself to calm down and move forward. My panicked, inexperienced mind tried to remember how long humans can hold their breath for. Someone had just taught me about it. A minute? Two? How long had I been holding mine? I was sure I was past the limit as I reached the other side and clawed the edge of the cover open. Too much oxygen rushed into my weak, frigid lungs and knocked me out.

This agony /
Such is the consequence of audience /
I will claw my way back to the Great Dark and we will not speak of this place again

    If you’re trans, the lonely, crumbling roads and towns of rural Texas are covered by that same suffocating blue. No matter the reason you find yourself there, you hold your breath. Halfway through, you wonder how long you can go without needing to take care of your body. It’s too late to turn around. Eventually, I pulled off at a truck stop. Dazed, dehydrated from crying and desperately needing to pee, I had forgotten my place. It suddenly came rushing back as two women entered the restroom I was using. They wouldn’t care that I was just a regular chick who was near mad with grief. No matter how relatable loving and losing a parent is, to them I was just a symbol. I hid in the stall until they left, not wanting to risk relying on my face, estrogenized for half of a decade, to keep me safe.

Only God knows, only God would believe /
That I was an angel, but they made me leave

     Slipping under the pool cover is not something I do lightly. The moments where I find myself in that big lonesome are always at a significant juncture: when I came out as trans, when I left my abusive marriage, when I fled home to Texas, when I moved with my girlfriend to Colorado and, finally, on the eve of my Dad’s death. All those decades ago by that cold, Colorado pool my dad woke me up and covered me in a warm towel. He wouldn’t be there this time.

     I sat in the car, finally letting myself exhale. I marveled at how utterly hopeless it was to parse what I was feeling. So I didn’t. I started the car and decided instead to permanently ruin a new album I had been meaning to put on. On road trips I always pass the time with new music. Taking advantage of the copious amount of emptiness there is in a 14 hour drive, I can finally devote my attention to music that doesn’t fit into a work commute or the hour of downtime I sometimes get before bed. Each trip, a new album inevitably gets stained with Texan dirt, tears, piss, and gasoline. As the gas stations and abandoned rustic store fronts gave way to the lone prairie, a grainy, warbly recording of a woman singing “Nearer my god to thee” filled the car. The low rumble of the road and light snoring of my cat and girlfriend coalesced with the whirring, screeching, mumbling molasses of Ethel Cain’s Perverts.

No one you know is a good person /
Fast, reckless driving often leads to slow, sad music

    I try to pace the music I listen to on trips. Alternating between accessible and inaccessible, the goal is to predict the emotional ark of my travels. I went into Perverts cold, and so I positioned it to fill a lonely moment I thought would need some slow transsexual Americana acoustic balladry. A moment where I could let myself wallow in some simple emotions. Her previous album Preacher’s Daughter was like that. I liked listening to it and ruminating on memories where I felt lonely and hurt. It re-contextualized traumas as plot points in a life I watched from the outside. Moody backstory music. Once the sample of “Nearer my god to thee” petered out, Perverts revealed itself to be something different entirely.

    There are glimpses of more traditional songs on the album, like the beginning of Vacillator. They are short lived. Reaching them feels like reaching Amarillo and watching a pair of young people in over-sized hoodies slinking into a sex store next to a Boba chain we also have in Denver. Are they like us? It feels so familiar. In an instant it folds into the rushing noise of tape hiss or wind and concrete friction. Brief moments of recognition are blasted away by a quiet dread. Ethel Cain’s passionate singing about love and sex gets crushed under an oppressive disintegration. All that remains is her whispering about wanting to be loved and hating it. Little pockets of hope and oxygen surrounded by a covered ocean.

    Outside of major American cities, the veneer of inclusivity vanishes. In its place, billboards remind transsexuals that they’re irredeemable perverts. I was hoping to feel something simple: sadness, anger, nostalgia. Instead, I found something on that highway and in that album that doesn’t have a name. I found myself wishing, for the first time in my perverted life, for there to be a heaven. I’d like the chance to see my Dad again. I let myself feel that as I passed under a sign that read, “Homosex Freaks Burn in Hell.” I chose to hold my pee until the town after, as if it was any less likely to be a death wish. I wondered how I was going to make it in a world that had one less person who cared if I vanished in it. I thought about driving on these same roads with him, as he helped me move to somewhere more accepting two years ago. On Perverts, Ethel Cain forced me to confront this absence and irony. Under the water of that pool in Colorado, I remember wondering if I was about to meet God. On Perverts, Ethel Cain brought me nearer to him.

It is such a precious thing to be loved /
Such a precious, magnificent thing to be loved /
Such a wondrous and painful thing to be loved /
When you were young, you said you wished that someone loved you /
I do /