Dry State
Sarah Fosburg
Utah is a dry state, which means that a) we can’t sell alcohol on Sundays and b) a steamed-up bathroom is the closest we’ll ever come to humidity. New York heat is like being slowly boiled; Utah heat is like being slowly baked. Deserts rarely look like cacti and cow skulls and endless sand — in Utah they look like miles and miles of sagebrush, twigs so dry they crumble in your fist, and permanent scabs inside your nose from dehydration.
These deserts are where I fell in love. I was nine years old, and my qualifications for loved ones were that they had to either be related to me or read the same books as me, and I fell in love with my best friend — who had moved to Utah from Georgia, who read the Warriors series, who understood that the sagebrush behind my house was the greatest place for adventures. Who thought my jokes were funny, who understood about my parents and my sister, who never laughed at me when I cried over little things.
But — she was a girl. And I was a girl. So immediately after I fell in love with her I decided almost subconsciously that I wasn’t in love with her at all, that I couldn’t be, because girls can’t love each other like that. We’re not allowed.
I still loved her, though, because that’s how love works. And the thing about this particular love is that it lasted. It lasted years and it wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I tried to make it, no matter how I tried to have a crush on boys at school. When the games we played involved holding hands, I held my breath and glanced away so she wouldn’t notice how nervous I was. When our phone calls ended and she hung up (she always hung up first), I whispered I love you into the receiver, so quiet I couldn’t even hear it myself.
In Utah, the second-driest state in the nation, the Mormon vote elects our politicians, the LDS Church shapes our culture, and there is no room for anyone even slightly outside the bounds of normal. And all the while we’re inhaling some of the worst air in the country, trapped under a choking layer of smog. Even if you’re in the 38% that isn’t part of the Mormon Church, its messages affect you without you even realizing it.
For years after my best friend moved to California, I went on trips to visit her. She went to Hollywood and became an actress, and her gigs took her to New Orleans, New York City, and Dublin. Always, wherever she went, she’d invite me along for a few days. To meet her friends and see the sets and help her practice her scripts. To watch her live out dreams that should have lit
her up, but instead swallowed her whole. Because even though she’d escaped Utah, she still carried it with her, like a family member you’re ashamed of, that bigoted uncle who’s always going to be related to you no matter how infrequently you call him.
The more serious my best friend’s film and TV offers got, the more we started to slip away from each other. And yet, the more we slipped away from each other, the more desperately we clung. I watched her on TV — Law & Order, Parenthood, Elementary — and every episode made the pit in my stomach a little bigger. I started saying “I love you” to her out loud, in person and over the phone, but it never felt important or magical the way it had when it was a secret. Instead it felt like a desperate, pleading lie. Please love me, I might as well have been saying. Please, just love me and I’ll be able to love you back. Please.
In Utah, it’s easy to forget who you are. It’s easy to forget that the oppressive majority religion and oppressive dry heat and oppressive bad air are not the entire world. Because when you’ve lived there your whole life, those things are the entire world, and even after you leave, the lessons you learned stay with you. Where you grow up is a part of you; you can’t shake it and you can’t run from it. I hear Utah in the way that I speak, when I drop the n and t from the word mountain, when I hesitate before swearing because I’m so used to words having heavy, offensive weight. I smell Utah, the chokingly polluted air, when they bulldoze New York City streets or I’m hit with a wave of car exhaust. And I feel Utah in the way that I love, in the way that I define my own queerness, in the way that I harm and am harmed by other people.
By the time my best friend and I kissed for the first time, we didn’t love each other anymore, and we had given up on ever loving each other in a meaningful way. We kissed because we owed it to each other to at least try kissing, because we wanted to see, just for a second, how things could have been. We kissed for the same reason we said I love you to each other — not because it was true, or right, but because we were trying to convince ourselves it was. And every kiss after that was the same — desperate pleas for a love that used to exist, that was stamped out.
Queer people are constantly told we are undeserving of love. We hear it from the world every day. We hear it in discriminatory policies, homophobic jokes, off-handedly insensitive comments. It’s exhausting to hear it from the world, and it’s agonizing to hear it from people we used to love. The people we had to stop loving because we’re not allowed.
Spring Issue 2019, Nonfiction
