Lakelore

by Anna-Marie McLemore

“Just go say hi to them, okay? You should know each other.” “Because we all rove around in packs?” I ask. “I mean, don’t we?” Abril asks.

“Okay, fine,” I say. “I’ll do it. Trans unicorns unite.” I bow,

I’ll take anything that might convince her to fit me in today, up to and including queer family nepotism.

“Sorry, sometimes I make mental notes to help me remember names but then I just remember the mental notes and not the names.

Or maybe I’m just seeing that because that’s what I’m so often doing, trying to make the chaos inside my head hold still long enough to let me understand it.

Everyone wants to think they see the best in everyone else, but when the bad comes out, they want to pretend that’s all they ever saw.

“No,” I say. “You’re making a lot of sense. The world could use daily gender forecasts.” The minute I hear myself say it, I know how stupid it sounds. But Lore’s face lights up. “Yes,” they say. “Sunny, forty-two percent expected femininity.” “Tonight,” I say, “cloudy with likely masculinity.” “Exactly,” Lore says.

I can’t really tell anyone what it’s like to be dyslexic. The same as how I can’t really tell anyone what it’s like to be nonbinary, or Mexican American. I can only tell them what it’s like for me to be dyslexic.

When it comes to being trans, so many things can take the air out of me. The misgendering. The questions about why I can’t just be a girl all the time if I can be a girl any of the time. The questions about what got me so confused that I became someone who lives in the space between genders, as though it was that space between that confused me, and not the world’s insistence that I live elsewhere.

But the process of explaining things wears out my brain. I want to take everything I’m thinking and just throw it all out there at once, like upending the contents of a box. But conversations don’t work that way. And it’s not lost on me how ironic it is that I don’t want to explain things even as I need things repeatedly explained to me. That’s where resisting my first impulse comes in. My first impulse is screw it, not worth it. But I set that aside, and instead, I do the math.

“Are you okay to be touched right now?” Lore asks. The inside of me feels like a knot most of the time. So when it loosens, like it does now, that’s the strange thing, like I’m coming apart. And in that unknotting, something else comes together. Lore listened, not just to what I told them but what I didn’t. I asked if hugs were okay with them because I wished people had asked me. Lore isn’t touching me unless I say okay.

“Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things,”

I hate when my brain does this. I’m so sure I’ve let something go, I feel practically triumphant with having let it go. Then it comes rushing in as hard as I pushed it away. I forget things exist and then, with a shock of remembering, realize I can’t forget they exist. They come out from behind the clouds and take up the whole sky.

“You try to remember that needing to change how you do things isn’t a failure,” Dr. Robins says. “Living with our own brains, it’s work we do our whole lives. And an inherent part of that is accepting that some things just aren’t going to work the same way forever. Some might. But some won’t. Some things will work for someone else but not for you and the other way around. And figuring that out, that’s part of adapting. You outgrow some things that helped you once. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad, or wrong. It just means this is where you leave them. Or this is where they become something else.”

Once you get past the fear of being seen, you can get to the part where you know you’re not alone.

I used to think the only options were the world under the lake and the world above it, good moments in my brain and bad moments in my brain, parts of me worth keeping and parts worth forgetting. But maybe that makes as little sense as thinking there’s only boy and girl and nothing in between. I’m proof of what exists between, and so is Lore, and everyone like us, just like the world under the lake is proof that there’s something between air and water.

Those of us who are transgender and nonbinary, we are beautiful. Those of us whose brains don’t process language or don’t process the world in the way we’re often told we should, we are brilliant.