Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

Writing down the name. Doodling a heart around it. That's what people in love do. That's what I'll do. Write her name repeatedly. Endless lines of "I love Pomona Strand"; the after-school punishment of the unaware. Of course it was daft, copying the shape of the movement, but what else was I to do. What others had, or said they did, I didn't. The standard was void. I was broken, like SuperTed, waiting for some fey stranger to come and sprinkle sparkling dust over me.

Noticing that Aladdin was good looking (don't point out that he's an animation and were he real would be a severe aberration). I don't remember the woman's name. I think she wore green.

A life-time of looking at the wrong part of the screen.

Was always accused of being gay, so always denied it, in much the same way I denied being a virgin in year seven because I couldn't remember what it meant. Actually not knowing what it meant probably did apply. What prototypes were there? None I was allowed to know about. I remember reading a book my mother had left in the bathroom (I learnt to read on whodunnits)
the heat and fury, the wrongness, the otherness, the elusiveness; the pages felt like they'd stain me.

The information didn't so much sink the battleship as move the sea upwards.
I discovered years later reading a borrowed copy of Tales of the City that this was the incendiary tome. Yet now it's just a slightly dated weak pamphlet. It ought to have been the point where I realised there were other people like me, except I didn't realise it was meant to be me in the book. I spent a huge chunk of my life being Tinkerbell; only existing when other people chose to define me.

One can never tell if the closet's made of mirror-glass or just glass. It's an inverse Emperor's new clothes.

Instead I spent much of my life not knowing, not quite knowing, while waiting for a straight guy to make the first move, to break the ice, the walls I didn't notice building, to take me through the looking-glass and to point out that the other world is the illusory.

No straight guy ever did. Instead, by some round-about route, I got there, flung against the mirror, impaling myself on it. Does one pull out the shards and risk bleeding to death, or leave them be and hope it heals?

I still haven't got them all out. Deep in the scars of that other world things grate, grinding painfully, slicing deep within me, wounds only I know, feel.

But everyone goes through a windscreen, falls out of a tree, or even builds their own cross to collapse on top of them. Enlightenment means, makes disillusionment; the improbable is easier to see dimly. Such is life. It always is just whatever it is, has been. The only variable is to be, but there's little leeway in that.

I would apologise for being maudlin, but I'm not quite sure I am. Intro-, retrospective. But even hindsight is only through dropped binoculars.

Anyhoo,