"Erin and I threw an impromptu pizza party for our shift one night.  We went to the grocery store together on one of our fifteen-minute breaks and picked out a few gluten-free and veggie pizzas, then chatted in the kitchen while they cooked, taking an extended break with no supervisors around that night.

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Another time, the power was down for two hours. The building went black all at once with a sound like a swarm of bees, all those monitors and energy-saving lights zapping off, and three different alarms began sounding off in overlapping sirens.  The advocates who'd just wrapped up and were about to exit the building waited inside for a few minutes while security checked outside. The electricity had gone out over a four-mile radius.   

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We pulled our chairs up to each other in clusters and inspected the dark hallway together, jumping and giggling every time someone was startled by the brush of an elbow. We played a round of charades. Judith and another advocate talked about BDSM as a mechanism both for reinforcing and subverting power structures. A few people talked about their favorite brunch spots. We made nervous jokes about an abusive chatter making good on their pledge last week to hunt us down.

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This was the part of the hotline that I wished people could see. We sent each other encouragement and puns made from emojis in our Gchat. We polled the room for resources or ways to frame a difficult truth. (“Instead of telling them that their partner only loves them like they love their car, what about saying that love in a healthy relationship is based on trust and autonomy, rather than possession?”) We pulled our chairs up next to each other during long conversations about struggles with gender expression, about not being able to take our own advice, and the transgressions of our pasts. To me, it resembled a youth group, both spaces where people who didn’t quite fit in found understanding.

 

Cory once told me that continuing to work there might be a way of avoiding the harder work of cultivating intimacy among friends with whom I lacked the same shorthand. I had to admit that I was reluctant to lose them. 

 

Part of me wanted to linger in the dark like we did in the power outage, walking each other up and down the halls by the light of our phones."