Many years ago, I had my fortune told by a bored psychic. She glanced at my palm and told me that my future included much travel. She glanced at my girlfriend’s palm and told her that she would have “many husbands,” which displeased her greatly. (“I think that one is for Jen,” she growled; she was still troubled by the fact that I’d also dated men.) As a friendly after-thought, the psychic told our friend Matt that he would be rich and then we parted ways and we felt as if we had had An Experience, though it was a low-calorie one, more taste than sustenance.

I didn’t realize until later that it was sustenance that I was looking for — that even then, even in silly sideways ways, I was undertaking the project of trying to imagine a future for myself. As a queer person, yes, but more specifically (though I didn’t have this language yet) as a genderqueer person who had been socialized female and could not see how to imagine a future inside that construct, and did not yet know that one might live outside of it. 

Sarah Mantell writes, of their play In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot: “For a long time, I couldn’t really imagine any kind of future for myself. Not a good one and not a bad one. This play was an attempt to imagine either – both.” When I read Sarah’s preface to their play, I felt a sense of recognition so strong that it briefly disoriented me; for a moment, it felt as if Sarah and I were – across space and time so thin it was already tearing – holding opposite ends of the same sustained thought. The image that came to my mind was of the kids in Central Park who I’ve seen making giant soap bubbles; sometimes the largest bubbles are generated by two kids holding opposite sides of the wet loop of rope that makes the bubble-wand. And the sense of marvel when the thing rises into the air: fragile, iridescent, impossible but mesmerizing.

When I saw In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, I was struck from the beginning by the way Sarah’s imagined future holds clashing contrasts. First: the tight, joyous, though not-unfraught intimacy of a chosen family group, who actively take care of each other despite the exigencies of their nomadic existence. Then: the paralyzing uncertainty and dread of occupying a landscape so devastated by climate change that the internet and cellular networks no longer exist, and that whole states regularly become submerged. 

What startled me most was that both the joy and the devastation felt true, but only the devastation felt inevitable. (I recognize that this tells you more about me than it does about Sarah’s intentions.) But what I mean is: if you are living inside a world that is actively ending, you should be so lucky as to have your chosen family gathered beside you. What I mean is: this is not a thing you can rely on, unless you build it and tend it, unless the flourishing of those you love becomes entwined with your own, in a series of choices both philosophical and daily. 

What I mean is most dystopian writing shows me what to dread, but somehow – surprisingly, subversively – Sarah’s play also shows me what to aspire toward, despite or in the face of that uncertain future.

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I have always been captivated by the practice of writing a future into being – whether in broad-stroke world-building ways or in a To Do list inside a notebook. It is the same muscle: working to understand your place inside time and space by extrapolating that place into the future and seeing what it becomes, how it might be held. 

In an earlier essay for Almanac on dystopian fictions, I wrote: Maybe the opposite of dystopia is the process by which we imagine what we most need to thrive, and then invite other people to join us there. To my delight, while In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is held inside the container of a dystopia, it imagines and invites thriving. Often in apocalyptic stories where small bands form, the narrative engine is the question of when and how they will turn against each other. In Sarah’s play, the communal group is the constant even as all else changes, including which cities and states still exist. Though the characters squabble and bicker like any family, though they know each other’s tells and call each other on their bullshit (“You only say ‘absolutely!’ when you absolutely did not”), they are committed to each other’s safety and happiness in short-term and in long. 

What if, in the face of fundamentally unreliable systems, we can be sustained by a chosen network of people with whom we share physical and spiritual resources? What if that is enough to generate a kind of cumulative happiness that rides alongside our fear and uncertainty? 

Unexpectedly, subversively— family, belonging, and sustained communal care are the underpinnings of most utopian fictions.

Over the years, I have looked in a lot of places for images of the kind of future that could hold me. What I am asking, I think, in its simplest form is this: What might it look like for someone like me to navigate the world in a way that lets them thrive?

I was raised moving between countries and cultures; my formative relationships occurred both across and outside the gender binary. There is a profound and specific isolation that occurs when you are required to insist on your existence inside a cultural narrative that is primed to disbelieve that you are possible. One becomes practiced in sleight-of-hand, omission, evasion, passing in any number of ways. And so for some time, I held compromise closer than truth: after all, it requires less of a person to be known partially. What I have discovered in recent years, to my own surprise, is that living in alignment with my instincts is less labor than evasion and compromise.

For me, one of the powerful pleasures of In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot is seeing nonbinary or fluidly gendered characters onstage without that ever once being a subject of argument or conversation: they just are, and their being is inarguable.

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I would hazard the guess that most of us are chasing the question What would it look like for me to thrive?, though the answers we seek may be manifold. Perhaps they are religious, or political, or familial. Perhaps they are connected to our current and increasingly drastic experiences of climate change. Perhaps those who see themselves constantly represented in the media are staggering underneath the avalanche of all those images: Are these stories inevitable? What if I don’t want them? How am I supposed to escape them? Perhaps the particulars of their own thriving are even harder to locate underneath all the ways in which they’re told what they should be. At least for me, the fact of having stepped outside of one of society’s biggest and most insisted-upon stories – the gender binary – has created a gap that is now present in much of my life. And one of the great gifts of that gap has been how it creates space for other kinds of examinations.

Inside gaps, more questions grow.
Inside questions, more futures grow.
Of the many questions that In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot asks, some of my favorites are these: 

What might it look like for any of us to thrive, inside circumstances that seem most primed for the opposite?
What do we require of ourselves and each other?
What can we still give each other, when we can’t have what we require?