Visiting Gramma in Hilton, NY
I write this with a heavy heart. Yesterday I arrived in Hilton, a small town twenty minutes outside of Rochester, New York. I’m here at my grandmother Simone’s house, alone with her and my step-grandfather Mike, making pictures during my summer break. If I could describe Hilton in a sentence, I would call it: what my depression feels like as a place.
The roads stretch endlessly, houses scattered far apart. Vast parking lots, oversized yards, and a silence that doesn’t soothe but unsettles. As someone raised in a denser, more populated place, Hilton feels like the middle of nowhere—a place where time stagnates, where people move in trance-like cycles, unable to leave. Coming here directly after Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I stayed in the lush Berkshires with my college friend Meghan, the contrast feels brutal. There, the landscape felt like flight—I was a bird. Here, I am a deer: skittish, hidden, always watching. I can’t help but wonder what my grandmother must wish she could ask Mike every day: why would anyone choose to live here?
Deer cross my path constantly, slipping out of fields and wooded edges. Sometimes I wonder if their appearance carries meaning, but then I remember: this is their world, and I am the intruder. Along the streets stand ranch-style houses with Trump signs, some bought, others scrawled in marker on poster board. It feels surreal to be here during the attempted assassination of Trump, and on the very day—July 21st, 2024—that President Biden withdrew from the race. Last night, my grandma FaceTimed my mom, who casually mentioned my dad had gone to a Trump rally in Seekonk, Massachusetts. I feel trapped between landscapes and politics, estranged from my family yet unable to stop judging. How could I not, when they support a man who has done to women what other men have done to me?
I grew up the black sheep in a conservative household where bodily autonomy, racism, and transphobia were treated like debate topics, not human realities. I grew up anxious, insecure, always bracing myself. Packing a bag to keep in your closet as a teenager is not normal. Hearing your father dismiss sexual assault as “locker room talk” is not normal.
It is depressing here. My mom called half an hour before I arrived to warn me that my grandma is taking antidepressants and not to trigger her with any Khmer Rouge talk. I recently learned my mom is, too. It feels uncanny—this triangle of women bound together by depression, each of us shaped by the weight of men. My grandmother trapped in an abusive marriage she can’t escape. My mother unfulfilled, bound to my father’s infidelity. Myself, still struggling to heal from sexual trauma. It is devastating to witness this lineage of women diminished, held back from their truest selves. My grandmother shuffles through her days as if through mud—an image I remember from a mental health intake form at Butler Hospital. “Do you feel like you are moving through mud?” the question asked. I know the answer.
She mutters to herself while watering the garden, insisting she “doesn’t take care of anything anymore.” She is critical of her appearance while I take her picture, saying she “doesn’t look good anymore.” My mother echoes her in her own kitchen: “there’s no love in my food anymore.” How is a daughter supposed to feel hope, to believe in love, when this is the chorus surrounding her?
Mike, meanwhile, sits all day on the couch with the television blaring, while my grandmother cuts the lawn and whacks the weeds on her own. The imbalance is painful to watch.
The house itself feels frozen in time. The sheets are forty years old. The walls are filled with shrines of photographs—mostly of my mother, but also of me and my sister. Images from her high school yearbook, her wedding, her “real” marriage. Nothing has changed since the last time I was here, in 2015, when I was fifteen years old—days before I began dating my first boyfriend— the one who did it all to me. Driving here this week, I had a panic attack and had to pull over, breath caught in my chest and pelvis. The body remembers the past. Being here is visceral. Hilton is a magnet that keeps pulling me back into the depths of depression, a vessel stuck in time.
On my first night here, Rochester was hosting Pride. I didn’t know why it was in July, but I knew I had to go. My mom once lived in the city as a teenager, in an apartment with my grandmother, where she found a surrogate grandmother in the neighbor upstairs. I, too, have grown up without a grandfather in America because of the genocide. Sometimes I look at Mr. Ting and wonder if mine would have resembled him—though I imagine my grandfather even sharper, carrying himself with poise. Sethon, a military official and politician, was deeply beloved by my mother. Though I never met him, I feel that love living on in me.
That night, I went to a bar called Lux, lured by reviews that said goth girls gathered there. I wanted to feel safe, because I had to go alone for the first time. It turned out to be a gay bar—something new for me, and unexpectedly joyful. At the counter, I copied the strangers around me and ordered a “Genny Light,” unaware it was the hometown beer, brewed just down the road at Genesee. A group of women in their thirties folded me into their circle, telling me about Rochester, a city shaped in part by its large Deaf community and the university programs that support it. For a few hours, I felt at peace among strangers—held in the warmth of a city that was liberal, diverse, and alive, everything the suburbs around it were not. And yet, the moment I returned to Hilton, I was a deer again—uneasy, exposed, and hiding in the dark.
