I showed up for the date and it was just some creepy dude, my Tinder match Arevik told me. She was one of only two women I’d matched with since arriving in Yerevan, so I took the opportunity to suss out the scene. What’s it like for lgbtq people here? I asked her. Bad. It’s bad, she said, but at least people have finally stopped shooting stray dogs. Arevik is a few years younger than me, justifiably terrified of ever meeting up. You don’t have to share anything with me, but we can just talk if you need someone to talk to about this stuff, I messaged her. For all I knew, she was a creepy dude too. Half of queerness is near-misses and partial recognitions.

---

At the home country orientation in Kansas, I’d met the other scholars and students in my Fulbright cohort. We sat in a small circle while some State Department rep spouted Cold War propaganda, assuring us of the significance of our mission to dispel misinformation. When he left the room, we chatted among ourselves. An older nuclear scientist named Ani studied me and noticed the two snakes coiled around my forearm. “Armenians don’t like snakes,” she said. “People won’t trust you.”

---

We really wanted you to come here, but we weren’t sure how to tell you…the Embassy official began. That it’s not accepting? I finished, coded. For a moment it was almost fun: a game of Reject! That! Identity! with a live, cafe audience. I thought about my old god and my new girlfriend as I stirred more sugar into my coffee. I already knew, I said, but it’s no worse than some of the towns I lived in back in the US. I know the push-pull small-minded people feel around queer folks: How fucking dare you exist. Why didn’t anyone tell me I could be different.

---

Outside the public library where I’d been assigned to run adult EFL classes, a dark-haired woman flagged me down. I recognized her from the placement interviews the library staff and I had just been doing inside since my classes, Business English and English for Public Speaking, had a B1 English proficiency prerequisite. 

She told me her name was Gayane, and she had three children and no time to come to classes and no friends who spoke good English, and did I offer private lessons? Officially, State Department fellowships don’t allow you to accept payment from outside sources. We decided on a language exchange: she’d help me practice Armenian, and I’d help her practice English. A week later, I bought a small gift box of Merci-brand chocolates at the grocery store and ordered a ride to her apartment. When I arrived, one leaf of the dining table was extended to accommodate me alongside her two little girls and the baby boy, a glittering paisley tablecloth thrown across the seam. Before us lay a spread of silvery river fish and a chicken buckwheat porridge–harisa, Gayane explained as she drizzled a swirl of oil atop my serving. I had never learned to eat fish with bones; my mom and sister would swell and itch if you so much as ate seafood and kissed them on the cheek; too ashamed to ask now, I choked down a couple of bones before I noticed everyone else plucking them from their tongues.

---

I wasted an extra ten minutes walking up and down Azatutyan Street because the walking directions on Google Maps didn’t say I needed to go inside the Veolia Jur building. I was three months into my Fulbright but I still didn’t really understand how to navigate the city outside of central Yerevan. When I finally ventured into the stone building, even more sweat clung to my underarms as I hunted for the correct floor. I knew I’d made it when I saw the decal on the wall of a figure in inverted repose, split double by a pole.

The class instructor spoke primarily Russian and I only English, so her assistant teacher translated mainly key words–пилон, нога, сжимать, рука. One of my favorite parts of dance is that it doesn’t necessarily require language as long as you can follow. And my brain wanted to: the instructor’s hip circles were squeezed springs in my own pelvis, her shoulder rotations, streams of water down the blades of my own back. When she turned to face me, I saw the tattooed gorgon occupying her entire upper thigh. I peeled off my long pants and we began. 

---

Through late fall’s cold weeks, Gayane and I had walked down the steep road to her daughters’ school to wait by the gate with the other parents who’d stared at us, unabashed. I admired the way she never averted her eyes. I kept my eyes fixed to the road or her face or the baby boy, մի կյանք, Gayane cooed to him now as he used his lone two teeth to ribbon a small apple’s skin. What did you do for your holiday? she asked me, spooning raspberry jam into her tea. You look more beautiful! 

I laughed back, “What, I wasn’t beautiful before?” 

The dew of fresh love made my face glisten. I’d returned from meeting up with Halah in Brussels, making requests in half-decent French, living their New York Christmas tradition of eating a massive feast at the neighborhood Chinese spot. 

One evening, we took the scenic walk back to our AirBnB from the Atomium and stumbled upon a stone amphitheatre. I snapped some pictures of Halah on my phone, their arms outstretched to hug the dusk. I asked them to take a video of me singing be steadwell’s “Precarious Place.” Satisfied, we resumed our walk. At the top of the hill cresting the cavea, Halah called out from behind me, “I am going to marry you one day.”

I relayed our adventures to Gayane couched in a confession. “In Armenian, everything is նա ե, so I haven’t had to specify, and I haven’t corrected you when you’ve asked about my ‘boyfriend.’” I looked around the small kitchen, at the black pot of boiling khinkali, out the closed window. “But my partner is a woman.” 

“I see,” she told me. “You do not tell people because you think they will understand you wrongly.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know about the Armenian King Pap?” Gayane asked. I shook my head no.

---

To this day, I’m not sure I could say with certainty why I chose Armenia. Cynically, I know that most prestigious programs are a numbers game: maybe you’re remarkable, sure, but maybe you applied to go somewhere few other people tried to go save for those who had deep family connections there. A Fulbright was no different; by the 2018 application cycle, I was well-versed in seeking out sure things. I had been acing academic interviews for years; like any good theater kid, I understood how to play to type. Beyond that, I’d taken a semester of Russian history in undergrad, had come to appreciate post-Soviet reflections on belonging and self-determination, had begun to wonder what our struggles shared, there and here. 

Had I considered that maybe I was just impressive? Back then, I couldn’t conceive of anything I offered being uniquely valuable.

What I figured was, I had lived most of my life in hiding. I knew what it meant to conceal huge swaths of my personality from people I cared about and who cared about me. I had only been fully out of “the Truth” for four years–long enough to shake the certainty of its dogma, not quite long enough to stop looking over my shoulder for a familiar SUV or conspicuous minivan rolling through my neighborhood, a sister in the Zaxby’s drive-thru spotting me inside with a man and asking me about him on Sunday. When I texted my mom that I was gay, she screamed and cried and said she loved me but she loved Jehovah the most, a notion she’d randomly pierce the silence between us to reiterate–I mean, what was another nine months back in the closet? What would it matter what language I was hated in? 

---

Натали! Нет—сюда, the pole teacher yelled, smacking my thigh so that I’d move it away from the pole and start to slide into extended butterfly. Intellectually, I know this position works through counterbalance—push with the bottom hand, pull with the top.  I’m not strong enough to hold this position yet! I panicked aloud. I clamped my thighs back around the pole and slid down until I felt my back touch the crash mat on the ground. Even sweaty and exhausted, my body remembers the fundamentals: Don’t roll through your shoulder. Protect your head. Don’t let go. I know I look strong, but I’m not that strong, I said to the assistant teacher, my eyes downcast. The assistant teacher pulled out her phone to record. She searched for the words in English for a moment, then settled on, Do it. And this time, you will do it beautiful. I stood up, shook out my limbs, chalked my hands again, re-approached the pole. 

---

I signed up for an Argentine tango class and predictably got lost on the way, walking up and down the same alley for ten minutes until I found the studio door. Anxiety dripped down my temple. I was partnered with a tall, fish-handed man and both our palms were damp. To the teacher’s counts, we practiced our openings and closings, small turns and smushed feet. When the music began, we met each other’s eyes and re-clasped our hands. After dance class, as I descended into the metro underground, a rose merchant asked me դուկ հա՞յ եկ when I passed his stair. 

---

When the plane first landed at Zvartnots, I walked down the jet bridge and emerged into a sea of dark curls. I had been wearing my own tight coils natural for 13 years by that point, having long since grown weary of chemical burns scabbing my scalp, but not since living in Georgia had I been around so much big hair in one public space. Boulder, where I’d been in graduate school for the preceding three years, was a tangled knot of fine, straight wisps, foreign strands strung from my bag when I got off the commuter bus each morning and each night. 

The yellow airport fluorescence bounced off the heads above me on the escalator as the green grapes of a massive NOY brandy ad lit up the wall behind us. In my phone, I searched the Armenian translations for “Can you wait for me?” “Where is the key?” “How do I get into the flat?” A woman tossed her long hair over her shoulder. The summer day scent of her perfume somersaulted through the air.

---

Instead, we ended up at the clockless underground bar where Cecilia and I had taken to drinking Jameson and Dargett beer until 5 AM, discussing everything and remembering nothing. We’d ascend into the lifting blue of the early day, wave like affectionate strangers, and trek in opposite directions to our respective apartments.

---

I had heard from another Armenian-American woman that Russians called Armenians black. And as with most places where white hegemony had long shaped culture, “black” was not a neutral descriptor. When I had been apartment hunting, the local real estate agent who helped me vented about the way she was treated when she visited Russia–service denial; cabs ignoring her; suspicious stares. Old shit in a foreign tongue. 

The early autumn sun made my skin gleam like glazed red clay. I realized as we walked that I had never lived somewhere that my complexion didn’t make me one of a handful of primary targets. I was an anomaly, but not a threat. My hair had grown long, suspending me in a state of safe falsehood: straight girl drag. I felt my pyrite freedom crunching underfoot. 

“I do not like Russians,” she said. 
“Why not?” I ventured.
“They have bad…” she began, then paused. “Характер,” she said into the Yandex translation app on her phone, then turned the screen to me. Character, it read. 

---

Over the six months I was in Armenia, I was asked countless times what I was doing there. Դոոկ աֆրի՞կի եկ, a gray-haired woman who begged in Republic Square asked me. հա, եվ չե, I told her. Ամերկիատսի եմ. African-American, though I only identified that way on surveys or hospital intake forms. Elsewhere and within myself, I was simply and accurately Black. 

Eventually, it started to piss me off that people questioned my intentions before inquiring about who I was, but I can look back and see why you’d check on what someone unexpected is doing in your neck of the woods. My partner and I have discussed this often: When you’re not in your hood, act like you’re not in your hood.

---

Two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic sent all the State Department program participants back to our home countries, our noses and mouths shrouded in scarves or eye masks or whatever spare fabric we could find, Sara kneeled in the corner of my living room with a sample pot of india ink on a paper towel in front of them. They dipped a gleaming silver needle in the ink and started a stick-and-poke tattoo on the inside of their forearm. Unlike the rest of us, Sara had moved to Armenia suddenly, fleeing their own bad habits and an abusive man in Portland, Oregon. Cecil was there too. I had come to appreciate our political discussions.
“Question for the room: Are Armenians white?” I asked.

By then, I had met Armenians from all over–Argentina, Syria, Lebanon, Canada, Brazil, Jordan, Georgia, France, Iran–spread as far as a swallow’s flight. To be a Black American was to inhabit the contradiction of borders: my birthplace conferred nationality, but not ethnicity; my ethnicity conferred community, but not origin; my origin conferred story, but not family. 

---

Anxiety kept me hungry. I would look out of my living room window at the grocery store across the street, Eva Syuzi, so named for the pair of sisters who owned and operated the shop. Up the block from my building, there was a covered produce shop. On the walk to my library post, I passed the street merchants on Mashtots Ave selling fruit and bread and candy and lahmajun.