TRAIN GRANDMA

Picture it: It's Christmas Eve, and you're riding the train across state lines to visit your family for the holiday. It's dusk, and from the window you notice a light snow begin to fall. You're by yourself and occupied, maybe reading a book, maybe scrolling through your phone, when all of a sudden, a beautiful figure seated across the aisle catches your eye. "She's magnificent," you think, as she draws a small Activia yogurt from her tasteful purse and begins eating it with the plastic spoon she must have stored in one of her several travel satchels the night before. You know nothing about this mature and resplendent woman; can barely discern why she's captivated your attention with such force and power; can't pinpoint the source of her magnetism, nor your attraction to it. It's not romantic, no--it's almost more mystical, more complex. More ancient. A feeling born from beyond your physical form; a feeling that transcends space and time. "Train Grandma," you think, the words crossing your mind with a nostalgia you can't quite pinpoint, a December wind whispering through bare branches. She is, you come to realize the longer you take her in, the landscape rolling by unnoticed, an aspiration, a projected possibility of a future self, an incarnation of the you you never knew until this moment you could someday become.

 

Not all of us have been blessed with a Train Grandma experience, but as long as we're alive, we have the unique privilege of not only contemplating who we'll turn into, but taking conscious steps to reach the most fully-actualized representation of ourselves--and as queer people, if we're lucky, we have even more opportunity to dream our someday-selves outside of the confines of pre-prescribed narratives and ON OUR OWN TERMS, HONEY! In our TENTH EPISODE, we're pulling apart all of this, plus a whole lot more (what else is new, my fam?!)--you won't wanna sleep on this one!