The name I go by is not the one that I was born with, but it’s not one I chose.

This process is not very different from what happens when you’re a baby, and someone, a person who hopefully loves you and knows a little bit more about the world than you do, gives you your name. This is done with the intent of giving you something to grow into, to be a good first impression, or at the very least, an interesting first impression, and with a name like Lolo, I fall into the latter category.  

Lolo has followed me around since I was a teenager, the obvious nickname for Lauren that felt like something more comfortable to slip into the older I got, and is still assumed by most to be short for my aforementioned dead-name. Once short for Lauren, it’s now short for Lochlan. I like the consistency with the cadence. 

Last fall, Laura Jane Grace of both Against Me! and her own solo fame released At War With The Silverfish, a seven track EP featuring a song called “Lolo 13.” I am a resident of Chicago, and LJG is also a frequent resident of Chicago. I woke up one morning soon after the release to two different messages asking if I had heard the song and is it about me? No and no. Well, at least not intentionally. 

I hadn’t ever expected to see a song with my name in it, much less a song that was written by an artist who is so central to my perception of my own transgender experience. Laura Jane Grace was the first public persona I ever watched go through transition while I was surrounded by other queer people and standing on the precipice of my own coming out. When Rolling Stone broke the news of her coming out in 2012, I was working as a camp counselor way out in Virginia peanut-growing country near the beach with shit internet reception, and made sure to keep the photo from the article saved on my phone where I wouldn’t have to look for it. She was sitting on a couch wrapped in a towel, and as trite as it sounds, 20-year-old me thought that LJG was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I saw her as a demigod. I went from calling myself a casual Against Me! fan to downloading their discography overnight, and started to look for myself in their songs.

Ten years later, in fact, almost ten years to the very day that Laura Jane Grace’s story made it to Rolling Stone, I write this while living a different life entirely, with “Lolo 13” set on a loop. I’m acutely aware of Main Character Syndrome because of spending too much time on the internet, but I feel okay making an exception to be doing the same kind of searching all over again. I hate lyrical analysis, but the song makes me feel like I’m being stared at very, very intently. 

“I asked for your name three times,
Just to make sure that I heard it right,
You told me my jeans don’t fit right,
Said that we should make out some time.”

LJG opens the song, and it always catches me off guard. In the romanticized montage that I imagine was my early to mid twenties, there is a girl who is me, and she does not know yet that she isn’t a girl. Because this is all very confusing for her, she’s built a fantastic persona. A lot of trans people talk about old selves and the ways in which those people disappeared, but I have an abundance of affection for that girl, even if her name was hard to hear, and even if she acted a little mean towards a lot of the people she wanted to sleep with. If there was a real-life Manic Pixie Dream Girl hall of fame, I would have taken a top prize for the act of leaning-in. 

The Lolo that LJG is singing about takes off in a disappearing act, leaving our singer looking for a ghost of a girl that she’s not entirely sure ever existed in the first place. 

“I won’t stop searching
For a girl in a city that I dreamed of
We met on a night that my mind made up
It all felt so real, why’d I ever have to wake up?

Lolo where’d you go, where’d you go?
I lost you in the morning ‘cause I couldn’t fall back into you.
Lolo where’d you go, where’d you go?
I lost you in the morning ‘cause I couldn’t fall back into you.”

The chorus loops and repeats and moves along through the end of the song, forever searching for a girl we couldn’t fall back into. I think about the ways in which I’ve disappeared. I think about the people I’ve disappeared, and I wonder if they still think about it, or if I’m inflating my own sense of importance because I’m listening to a song with my name in it. Laura Jane Grace is a woman with much more important problems to sing about, and I know she isn’t singing to me, but the role she plays through my headphones fills a gap. 

What I want to say is, “Lolo didn’t go anywhere at all, I found her, I’m keeping her right here inside me and she’s doing okay!”

What I want to say is, “the Lolo you met never existed in the first place!” 

What I want to say is, “I never even wanted the name Lolo in the first place and I wish I could separate it from Lauren, but now this song exists and it makes my name feel like a blanket.”

I don’t know who Laura Jane Grace wrote “Lolo 13” for, but the mirrors I see between this multiverse of Lolo have kept the song repeating in my mind whenever I hear my name said out loud. Maybe it’s a song about a lot of people. We know that Lolo is a nickname for Laura, too.

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