The Mirage Of A Lake They Drained To Cool A Datacenter

I was pretty upset last night thinking about what I lost when these people took power and began to destroy the society I live in, so I tried to get some of the pain out. I hope maybe other people can find catharsis in this piece, too.

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My dad got sick when I was 12 years old. He was maybe 30, I don’t remember, he was an adult to me then so everything over 15 was an adult and therefore old. He had always been strong up until that point, an athlete since his preteen years and a physical therapist for as long as I could remember. It made his descent into illness wildly dramatic, because he stopped being able to do things with his body first—he learned he was sick when he tried to teach me how to ice skate and found his balance was so shot he, a hockey player since he was five years old, could no longer stand on skates without falling—and then the mental descent followed, the unemployability, the inability to drive and the homeboundness that condemns a person to in America, the mood changes, the alcoholism, the subsequent tenuous grasp on our mortgage payments. The potpourri of concern at the age of 14 became an ever-present mix of whether my dad would be In A Mood Tonight, whether he’d finally aim right with the glass he might hurl at my mom, what the adjusted-rate mortgage would be in a few months. 

We never determined if what he suffered from was genetic or a freak thing that just happened, and I still don’t know to this day. At the age of 16, uncertain if this ticking time bomb laid in my DNA, I decided that if I woke up one day in adulthood and found I couldn’t balance anymore I’d get my affairs in order and write a little note and be done by that evening. I couldn’t, never wanted to, deal with that shit after I saw what it looked like up close. 

With this childhood and the burbling cauldron of repressed transsexuality on the back-burner of my mind for my twenties, I never entertained the thought about what my future held because it felt like pointless masturbation. I knew this society hated people like me. I knew my family hated people like me. I saw the best-laid plans of my straight white cisgender dad and our middle-class family annihilated by the whim of chance, bad economic conditions, and an indifferent society with no safety nets already. What hope did a faggot like I have to dodge fate? 

I almost hoped I had the disease so I never had to find out what old age would bring, because I knew it would be horrifying—either I could come out and die of poverty, or live the rest of my life trying to hide from the gnawing, miserable secret about who I was that consumed me, day in and day out. Fuck planning. I decided to make a little money, have a little fun, and see what the coming years brought as they arrived. Never think more than a few months ahead. It was just too grim to consider. I bounced around the US for a while, moving from state to state and relationship to relationship. Even when I finally came out as a trans woman, I was still unable to envision what a future could hold for me. 

Then I fell in love during the hardest year of my life. My mother had freshly spurned me after my grandfather’s death, after years of prolonged estrangement. Grief led me to almost die by my own hand. At what felt like the nadir of my existence, my wife-to-be hiked with me to Third Burroughs, at the edge of Mt. Rainier. There she read me After The Winter, a poem by Claude McKay about surviving the trials of life so you could build the future with your lover, and asked to marry her. We stood together atop the highest ground above sea level I’d ever been on before or since, and we planned our marriage. We almost got struck with lightning half an hour after she proposed; a freak storm rolled in and we booked it when we realized we were the highest objects for miles around and our hair was standing up completely on end. 

We went cackling, sliding down the snowy slopes of the mountain sledding on our pant seats, giddy and unkillable, having thwarted God’s desire to kill us. At the base of the mountain we came back into cell service and the first message we received was that Joe Biden had dropped out of the presidential race. We laughed even harder. Maybe we had dodged all the lightning. 

We married in the King County Courthouse on October 23rd, 2024. For roughly two weeks my mind ran wild, vividly envisioning a future for the first time in my life. I saw the two of us, transgender lesbians, sitting on the porch of a little house or the balcony of a condo or the backseat of a station wagon or really anywhere at all, watching the rest of the world go by while we aged together. I saw us everywhere and nowhere in particular as old women still in love. I saw us in every old couple whose eyes were still full of love for one another that we walked past. I understood for the first time in my life when I woke up on October 24th, 2024, with my wife next to me in our bed in our home in our city after a night with our friends, how people saw a future for themselves and lived for it. 

Two weeks later was the third presidential election of my adult life. All of them up to this point had contained Donald Trump, and he won this one, too. I watched the election results roll in on CNN with a watch party of friends, all trans women. The mood began tense but hopeful and rapidly turned to that of a funeral. I went into a state of shock almost immediately; some of us wept, all of us drank and smoked, knowing what it meant. The awareness that we had not dodged the lightning was palpable. 

My worst fears manifest into reality every day now. When I wake up I grimace and check my phone to find out what fresh hell has been wrought upon my friends and my neighbors and my wife and I. When I lie down at night I steel myself for the grimmer future awaiting me the next morning. Those two weeks I let my guard down and had the audacity to imagine a life as myself where I grew old and happy and these motherfuckers destroyed it in one night and continue to destroy it every single morning. I saw a happy full life for the two of us laid out ahead, a wispy mirage of a real lake finally coming into view, and they drained it to cool a datacenter before I could ever reach it.

It would almost certainly be less painful to let go of it, regress to my teenage years, and admit that a future is for other people. Get my affairs in order, plan for the day I can’t balance, and write a little note. But I saw the two of us in rocking chairs, wrinkled hand in hand, sitting on a porch, me sipping a vodka sprite, her having a little weed, as we watch the sun set over wherever we call home, crinkling our crows’ feet when we smile at each other. On the off chance it still happens I gotta be around for it, you know?