It should never have occurred to me to drive a car into a river on purpose. But I rounded a corner at the National Gallery and there they were: Cars in Rivers and the people who put them there. Axle-up submerged, their owners sitting on top, staring down at their folly. If you Google it, you do not get an accurate idea of its size. The photos span a wall. Over and over again, cars in rivers and the people who put them there. And in the hard-lined backgrounds was Iceland: cragged mountains, expanse of blue sky, the strange, Martian mixture of greenery and snow and steam that being this close to the arctic circle and the magma below produces on land.

I laughed hard and long into the silent museum. I have a very distinctive laugh, a cackle topped with a snort. It sounds like I’m saying HA HA HA.

When something large looks tossed aside, I can’t help but bask in the glow of nice, warm schadenfreude. How could they have been so foolish as to contend with nature? God or the sky is a happy child, and They have picked up our greatest inventions and planted them in the mud. Because you can’t take your car off the road in Iceland. The tires will open a scar in the land that will just keep opening and opening until everything is black sand and ash and the whole place blows away. So when you are on the roughest roads — the roads marked with an f — and you come to an unbridged river of which there are plenty, you say a prayer to your favorite god and you drive straight through.

I opened a scar in that silence when I opened my mouth with wild laughter because you know, you just know, that right up until that cannon-loud shutter-click, that impartial witness to failure, those drivers thought they were gonna win this thing. Now what? the work seemed to ask, with a wry smile to the audience. Now fucking what? I laughed and laughed. Earnest delight.

I had never encountered Ólafur Elíasson’s work before, or at least, I thought I hadn’t. His studio encompasses disciplines from architecture to cooking to engineering, and following his studio website is a visual, and sometimes literal, smorgasbord. He’s had a hand in buildings: the façade of Reykjavík’s Harpa, a glass and metal beehive, with its polygonic windows and soaring ceilings. In partnership with an engineer, his project Little Sun is as practical as it as artistic. Launched at the Tate Modern, its mission is to provide sustainable energy in the form of solar lamps — joyful, glowing objects radiating light brought down to us from space.

As I dove deeper into my Elíasson-spiral, I recognized him like an old friend: he seems obsessed with space, with changing the way we see it, with bringing the self to bear on the world around us in interesting, kind, and playful ways — through the thoughtful placement of mirrors, for instance, to make a gallery into an infinite funhouse. The viewer sees themself from surprising perspectives, making sense of the different ways their body inhabits space, as natural as standing. All this at a time when the way my self moves through its usual spaces was changing, changing in lightning strikes brought down from the depths of a vast, tumultuous sky.

The guide told me as the bus crossed a bridge, if you put your car in the water there they’ll never find you. In the same breath she said the milkmen used to cross each day next to that eons-deep chasm driving their cars in rivers with water up to their waists and on the other side they’d have blankets and soup. Supposing they were still alive. I craned my neck to see as our bus went through a river, a puddle by comparison, but I knew it didn’t matter. I saw that photo of the tour bus in the gallery. If that puddle wants us, it doesn’t matter that we’re on a mountain bus with silly-high tires. If that puddle wants us, we belong to it.

Shortly after that trip to Iceland, I came out as trans. I have, in that time, essentially birthed myself. No one told me that my new full-time gig, on top of all my other full-time gigs, would be my gender. Thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it, crying about it. It has been a very serious nine months. Exhausting. Made all the more tiresome by the fact that I am not a serious person at all. I am an educator, as I have been for most of my adult life, and I’ve built my entire pedagogy on play — lowering the stakes, breathing into the not-knowing and doing life anyhow. Well, student, you’ve never edited video before? Great! You will now do so on a final project. This idea is half-baked? Brilliant! Let’s all take a look at it and speak. Things just stick better when you stumble upon them. It’s so important to recognize that so few things are permanent, if any, that their consequences are manufactured, that looking stupid is both temporary and unimportant. What rules would you break by accident? What would you write if you could write exactly what you wanted? I had no practice for becoming solemn, pinched, dour. I had no framework for consequences being so grave and outside my control. And one of my favorite people was very, very unhappy that I was trans. And so I became very, very unhappy that I was trans as well.

I began to have panic attacks. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t finish or start anything. I couldn’t write anything longer than a line at a time that I would whisper, breath-short, onto a page in the moments before I was shaking, crying again. My binder, the object I’d been using to flatten my chest into the shape I see when I close my eyes, began to injure me for the first time in its five years of use. I couldn’t feel my hands or close my fingers. I could no longer hold a pen. The metaphor is so on point that I can’t believe it existed as a real event. The weight of the coming-out-consequences was compressing my spine. I felt like all the liquid in me would be squeezed out, the blood and the water, like my lungs were bound too. My gender, what was supposed to be freeing, stopped words from flowing through my fingers.

All this began, this beginning, was bullshit. I was angry. Angry that this joyous expanse I had discovered in myself could be so dangerous and rotten, that standing under something limitless could feel so much like being stranded. I had always made things, written things, to grab onto, to speak my own worlds into existence and revel in their joy, but everything felt so huge and foreign and ungraspable. Writing had always been play, and I couldn’t play anymore. I stopped working on my novel. I stopped working on everything.

Now what? my life seemed to ask. Now fucking what?

I rented a small blue Kia Rio with only nineteen kilometers on it — just picked up yesterday they said — and I was so riddled with anxiety I didn’t eat hardly once. Good nature, even from the driver’s seat, much like good art, makes me laugh or makes me hard or both. It was both that day, until I realized I had overshot my turn by two hours because the signs were rocks in my mouth that didn’t match where I was going and the map was a sketch by Icelanders who are migratory birds and don’t need directions to know. When I saw how far off I’d gone I split the sky with wild laughter while the island smoking cigarettes deep inside her parted her lips and spit forth a loud fuck you. So that’s why all the roughest roads are marked with an f. And up until that lost and lonely blinking dot I thought I was gonna win this thing.

The only thing I wanted to do was iterate on the lines. Lines about cars in rivers. I’d started them on this magical trip, the last bastion of happiness before the fall, and like all my half-baked poems, I expected the verses not to trouble my thoughts again. I expected to leave them in my journal where my bad poetry belongs. But I couldn’t think of anything else. I wanted to repeat them into the world, to play on the sparse jungle gym I’d built for myself after seeing this artwork, this catalyst for something newer, bigger. I started the summer as a cisgender novelist; I ended it as a transgender poet. In my depth of winter, I was able to find the voice in my head again all because someone, several someones, drove their cars into rivers and someone had thought to collect them all. To show me how to continue, learn to playfully rework in the face of distress. Ólafur Elíasson. I could kiss him.

I’ve since ordered a hardcopy of Cars in Rivers. It’s a strange little book, bilingual in Icelandic and English, a floppy little production that might be of little consequence unless you are me. I pay homage to Ólafur Elíasson’s art wherever I can, most recently at Galería Elvira González in Madrid, where I got to see A View of Things to Come. Large hoops, black on one side with a series of childlike bright colors on the other, adorned the space outfitted with mirrors. You see yourself reflected back at yourself; you can see everything, all the hoops in the space, even the ones you haven’t seen for yourself. The viewer can see what’s about to happen, a round, whole being in dynamic space that becomes its subject, a complete and complex opposite of the subject in Cars in Rivers. The subject of Cars in Rivers is static, trapped in a moment. The subject of A View of Things to Come has a past and future in the physical world. And they are psychic.

As I stood in this strange, clairvoyant space, I saw beyond the confines of my present reality. One that was still dotted with panic attacks, strained under the weight of my identity and what it meant to each person in my life, what it was supposed to mean, if anything, hurtful words still sounding in my ears. I saw the future, one full of bright colors where the hoops had already been jumped through. One where I was self-assured, happy, surrounded by art and love. But here — here was an answer to now fucking what? Now what? Look forward.

As I pointed Southward I flicked my eyes to the rearview mirror and saw you in the backseat. I carried you the entire way, did you know? I really split the sky in two, did you see it? Or were you sleeping? On the left side of the gray-paved road a clear blue wind-chime, a hand-bell. On the right the gray-laden clouds wept streaks of far-away rain that we drove through and through again visiting snowglobes. They shook and washed away the bugs but not my stomach-clenching fear of planting the car in a river. I stopped us at a waterfall to feel like we had done something and I sat on a rock and I cried like the clouds, knees hurting like I had run us there.

That’s the other thing good nature and good art ask of me: to return to water, to sob with an open mouth and leak from behind my sunglasses. Laugh and cry as hard as mountains pushing themselves out of the earth. And slow. The guide said her grandparents spent the first twenty years of their lives in turf houses. Houses made of earth and stone and grass. I bet you thought this would end with my car in a river.

One moment, a moment many people have had, a defining moment, but still. It’s only one. You have to see past that moment, view yourself as a whole being, a being with a body and a gender and a look of wonder on your face as you contemplate the giant bowl of sky above you, moving through the world, and a time will come when you can breathe into play again, and look forward. Make moves. After it’s all done feeling like the biggest disaster. After the car insurance company is finished murderizing your ass. After the photo of you and your upended Kia Rio is taken and hung up in the gallery. Someday. Someday, if you compose it and contextualize it with all the other folks who have put their cars in the rivers, you will laugh. When you look at it like that, from your swing above the water, you will laugh and laugh. Because in the assemblage, the iteration, is the joy. And that laughter will be earnest.

A.E. Osworth is Part-Time Faculty at The New School, where they teach digital storytelling to undergraduates, and they serve as Managing Editor for Scholar and Feminist Online, an academic publication produced by Barnard. They’ve spent the last half decade as Geekery Editor at Autostraddle, where they covered technology and told people what to do with their relationship lives. You can find their work there, and also in The Rumpus, The Inquisitive Eater, Argot Magazine, and Mashable.

Sometimes Your Car Goes in the River was originally published in drDOCTOR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.