Aug 31, 2008 08:47
I am a melancholy soul by nature, so I do not say this sort of thing very often, but cons break my heart, shatter it sometimes into a million pieces for all the ways I've been blessed.
Because I have lain down with monsters and conquered worlds. Because I have the luck and the lies to look like what I feel like no matter its shifting. Because I have a freedom and foolishness that means I never have to go back, go home, return to normal, because I am blessed with a certain bit of water to my soul.
There are nights when I hate to take off the clothes and nights where I don't manage it all the way, where I am mesmerized by and most powerful in the moment where I do not cease to become what I am playing at, but get to discover that creature in its most private moments. Naked and ordinary without the armour of clothes. It is when I find their melancholy and find that it is just like mine. Where I see my skin as if I have never had the luxury of touching it before.
I hope, desperately, that other people are like this, but I tend not to think so, and hate myself for the hubris of it. There was a man last night, cosplayng Jack. The coat was wrong, but the drape was right and at the gay dance party I saw him make out with a least one man and several women. I watched him, out of the corner of my eye as he leaned down to them and smiled, as he touched their faces as they kissed, as he pressed his forehead to theirs like it all mattered so terribly desperately, and I knew that maybe it did.
Everyone deserves their fairytale, but I can never tell at cons when people are getting theirs or are just getting good enough or close by. And it breaks my heart. Breaks my heart at the Browncoat Shindig which was really just a party for one hell of a funeral that's been going on for years now, and that I suppose will always be going on. Breaks my heart when I see wonder in someone's face at that moment where they discover they have to squint just a little bit less for the stories they've always loved to be just a little bit more true as they invite them in and invite them home.
And so I prayed in the dark of the gay dance in the tiny room without air conditioning, dark and sweaty and reeking of alcohol with a cake in the corner in honor of George Takei's marriage, that when people see me at my finest, at my worst, at my pieces of others who refract so unquietly out of every goddamn part of me, that they don't see all my drowning melancholy, but this faint light of possibility, pulsing and tenacious.
I have lain down with monsters. And some of them were you, but most of them were me. I hope it was goddamn beautiful; I hope you know you can conquer worlds.