In my dream the station wagon is nearby but the fog holds our attention.

In my dream his shirt shows that he rejects the proposed choice while a framework of painted bars  pulse across the metallic grey sky around him.

In my dream the sign hovers, read before it can come into focus. I feel its words in my throat and see the horizon creep closer.

In my dream it’s muted and the light is coming down.

In my dream there are a jumble of topics: the contract for 44 thousand dollars, the sculpture of the back of Sonic’s head, the tight aisles leading to the back room. We softly argue about them all.

In my dream there is a quiet argument around why he is wearing a tuxedo. He is smooth, like a tin toy.

In my dream the violet car is squared off like a children’s drawing.

In my dream there is a scene with a forgotten celebrity around a spiral staircase made out of hammered red license plates.

In my dream he wraps the caramel cookies I’ve purchased in wax paper and thin satin ribbon. We flirt in French and I am charmed by his round face and trimmed mustache.

Thinking long term one thing we will need is archives, analog archives. The instability and malleability of digital media and digital culture means that we need to document Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinxs, & disabled lives in ways that leave a record for those that come after us.

We all need to learn how to preserve family photos, how to store zines, how to keep the physical proof of our existence from being disappeared. In the coming attacks on queer sexuality (disguised as attacks on pornography) we need to safeguard the evidence that we were here.

How do we know that trans people have always existed? Through the work of historians looking through the historical record of documents and material things. Digital culture makes the falsification of that record all the easier. We will need a new samidzat culture, to counter the new transnational oligarch culture that Trump and his ilk have been thirsting for.

We need to think about small, dispersed archives rather than centralized ones that would be more vulnerable to grandstanding attacks. Even the documentation of our mundane lives could mean the world down the line. If we want to control our own history, we need to know the nuts and bolts of preserving that history.

We need to preserve the goofy, the joyous, the odd, the ways that we played and loved, all the things that we would be delighted to find even though we thought them slight in the moment. These are things that may not seem important, but are the sparks of future hopes.

In my dream it feels like I’m moving sand around in my stomach.