When I published my first Dispatch about The Lake on May 7, 2023, it was a story about disruption. Heavy rains would flood the only road into my Tbilisi neighborhood, producing first a puddle and soon a recurring lake, one of many obstacles locals would encounter on their stressful days. Instead of fixing it, authorities chose to invent nonexistent problems. In short, the story was a bit of a political rant.
When, exactly two years later, on May 7, 2025, I published my second Dispatch about The Lake, it was a story about acceptance. Construction on four residential buildings, responsible for the damaged road, was still ongoing, so The Lake was growing and thriving. Adults now avoided it via an ad hoc pedestrian bypass, while local kids and dogs chose to interact with the water, wading into it, biking through it, or standing in the middle for no reason. Then I somehow made the story about the struggles of Georgian resistance and the nation’s overabundant patience in the face of repression.
Now it is May 7 again, but in 2026. During the year that passed, construction finished, and the flooded section, too, was finally taken care of. The Lake disappeared, leaving me with a mixed sense of relief and regret.
But then, ultimately and inevitably, The Lake returned, and The Lake returned with a force greater than ever before.
Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to talk about… to simply talk about The Lake.
They started repairing The Lake area months ago.
Residents were already moving into their newly built apartment blocks and renovating. Workers appeared near the damaged road, too. The men, as men often do, looked like they knew what they were doing. They soon built a new sidewalk opposite the narrow, concrete pedestrian “bridge” that had been arranged earlier for locals to bypass The Lake. A storm drain was installed in the new sidewalk, while the “bridge” was left untouched, turning it into a kind of opposite sidewalk. The temporary construction fence that had led to the accumulation of rainwater was also dismantled.
After that, The Lake was absent for a while.
Then, rain after rain, puddles started reemerging. It didn’t take long for those puddles to grow into a lake. The Lake, now fully resurrected, did not mind the new drainage system: she simply used the two sidewalks around her as a mold to reinvent herself in a new shape, greater length, and bigger depth. The only acknowledgment, the only sense of purpose she left for that drain hole, was a tiny dry – at times heart-shaped – asphalt island around it, which she, after showing some initial restraint, still ends up flooding.
The Lake keeps coming and going, returning stronger and larger each time. The two sidewalks around her have now become a mere illusion of choice, a freedom for locals to pick which way to avoid the water each day – some level of positive liberty in unfree times.
The Betrayal
It was late February, and The Lake had long marked her grand return, when unfamiliar sounds disrupted the peace of our neighborhood.
A stage was being arranged in front of one of the new apartment buildings, not far from The Lake area. An event crew had arrived, bringing their equipment and checking the sound. Fancy cars parked one after another, drones began flying overhead, chairs were set in front of the stage, and a screen behind read that “more than 2,500 citizens affected by cooperative housing construction have been provided with residential space.” The familiar municipal decor and the bustle of workers announced the mayor’s arrival. Not something you get to witness here every day, or every year.
The Mayor indeed came to inaugurate the finished construction, but I got to watch him on TV.
I had to leave for the office earlier, passing through the area while the stage was still being set. An elderly neighbor, a grey-haired lady, was heading from the opposite direction and seemed similarly confused by the sudden revival of the place. If, before that day, the two of us had only exchanged curious glances, unsure whether to say hello, now we finally exchanged scattered words of discontent. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, or whether The Lake was explicitly mentioned, but I know we both had the same rhetorical question in mind: Where was The Lake when we needed her?
The Lake was not there that day. She didn’t appear in the drone footage that, livestreamed by pro-government channels, presented the neighborhood cleaner than we knew it. Neither did she bother to give familiar panic to officials who drove into the area in their expensive cars. The Lake chose to spare, to whitewash the government, and to betray the neighborhood that came to embrace her. She only reappeared two or three days later, when it was too late.
I tried to find excuses. I wanted to think that cruel officials kept checking the weather only to somehow squeeze the event into a lake-free period. I wanted to think that the raindrops that started falling on that day were a desperate cry of the deceived Lake struggling her way back. She just didn’t make it in time.
But now, months later, I want to think differently. I want to think that The Lake simply did not care what I, or anyone else, wanted her to do, when to appear or disappear. The Lake had her own nature, pace, aesthetics, and her own battles to fight, including a battle not to be defined by someone else’s battles. The Lake had her own story, and society and its politics, the incompetent government and those resisting it, only mattered to her insofar as they allowed her to have that story.
Battles of Water
I saw her fight one of her latest battles in early April.
The Lake had grown largest she had ever been under heavy rains, attracting renewed attention from local workers. I watched in suspense as three men in black raincoats and water shoes tried their best to drain it. They, again, looked like they knew what they were doing. They opened the drain cover, first doing something with spades, and, when that didn’t work, bringing a long tube and sticking it into the well. At that point, I felt I was rooting for The Lake. The Lake won, and the men left.
And yet, the stable ability of The Lake to preserve and reinvent herself, to force her way back against every effort of men who seem to know what they are doing, still comes with a hidden sense of imminent loss. Every time The Lake appears, it feels like it is her last time. Every time she disappears, you think she is never coming back.
That’s what I was fearing when I started writing this text: as May came, she had been absent again for weeks. Maybe those men had won, after all. Then, over the past few days, shower by shower, thunder after thunder, she reappeared. She is still here, changing colors with the rapidly changing weather, and menacing the lingering island before she swallows it.
Can The Lake ever be drained for good? I don’t know. But even if that day comes, it will be after she has drained me of any temptation to make The Lake about anything other than The Lake herself: she is muddy enough to be further polluted with someone else’s unresolved issues, let alone the nation’s political traumas.
For that, I admire The Lake, and I envy The Lake.
