Oh, Satinjoy, I will truly miss your posts. It was you that made the forest a welcoming, friendly, warm place.
Yes, you.
I'll try to keep an eye on it. Since you, ativan, Shantel, and most of the others are gone, there are very few left who can keep a sense of history alive. I'm ill-suited for the job. I'm not a mainstream non-binary. I did a 180-degree transition and live as a binary woman. Only in grimy corners of my brain am I truly non-binary, and even in those I'd happily scour out all the male if I only could. I have no clue what it's like to want/need to present androgynously, no clue what doing that would involve, and no clue what sort of dysphoria precipitates from inability to find a sweet spot in between the binary genders. True, I have the gift of empathy, but that gift is known on occasion to desert me in spectacularly insensitive ways.
I'm the last person anyone ever choose to be the caretaker of the forest. I certainly didn't fit in with the folk that were there. When the "family" thread was started, it was clear I was seen as sort of a distant relative (when I was mentioned at all), the great-great grandfather who visits from The Home periodically to offer some banal commentary that always starts "In my day..." Most of the posts in the "what sort of creature are you..." thread went over my head as I watched the others trade words full of emotional content that completely eluded me.
If you hadn't been there, I wouldn't have bothered.
But you always made me feel as if my posts had value. That even though I wasn't tuned in to the zeitgeist of the place, you went out of your way to convince me that my words had been heard and understood.
I'm not one to hold onto the past. I'll move past this quickly, adjust to the new reality, and fit in the best way it can. You and I will (I hope, I hope) continue to be friends, but a voice of warmth will be lost, and I have no choice to mark its passing and ride the emotional wave of chagrin that it generated.
