//------------------------------// // I Tell You a Mystery, We Shall Not All Sleep, But We Shall All Be Changed // Story: We Will All Be Changed // by Cynewulf //------------------------------// They let us leave with Twilight wearing the outfit I’d assembled, which I appreciated. The woman checking us out had a smile that was just a bit more than professional, and I didn’t blame her. Twilight was truly dashing. She—he?—they? Had been just as good looking in something professional as I could have hoped in my wildest dreams. I admit I’d not had as clear a plan after shopping. I’d really only made it that far. But Twilight didn’t seem fazed at all. We walked leisurely, the whole length of the mall, warm hand in warm hand, and it was beautiful. I didn’t know another word for it. A weight was off Twilight. I could tell. I could feel it like it had come off of my own shoulders. And it was so, so strange. I don’t know how to describe the feeling. With Twilight’s hand in mine, the feeling was more… it was like being on uneven ground, climbing together. Twilight let go for a moment to adjust something and instantly I felt a little colder, a little more uneasy. And then the hand was back, and the world stabilized. A bit. We got lunch in the food court. It’s gauche, but it tastes good and it makes Twilight happy. The greasier, more carb-laden food is the more happy Twilight is, it seems. Sometimes I roll my eyes, but it is endearing in a way. Twilight—complex, full of deep ideas and endless calculations, and also extremely simple in her animal comforts.  Twilight juggled abstractions that I am not sure I could even begin to consider. And she spent half of her life in semi-dirty pajamas eating hot pockets and fritos by the computer light. I don’t know why I found this delightful, but secretly I did! I suppose it was honest. It was so absolutely, unthinkingly honest, so absolutely natural that it had not and perhaps would not ever occur to her unprompted to alter this. Life was lived in the moment as much as in the future. Twilight Sparkle planned, and she stressed, but he also lived sometimes with absolutely no qualms for the minor mores of lesser minds and busybodies and I envied them that. And the honesty was really the problem, wasn’t it? I am not honest. Oh, I can be honest. I am not deficient in honesty, or incapable of it! Truth be told, I can be brutally or kindly honest with the best of them! But I am not honest. It isn’t something I just do. It’s something I choose to do, because it is right, or useful, or asked for. For me, honesty is an action, and not a way of being. Art is artifice. Artifice is the creation of simulacrum. I create. I mold. To tell the truth one tells it slant. All of this is such a terrible way to explain how uncomfortable I am being so, so openly without the comfort of artifice. Some people wear clothes for warmth and I wear them because what we put on is what we are. I obsessed over color and shape because that is the fundamental material out of which the whole world is made. Twilight had stood in front of me, naked despite the coat, their heart exposed, and I had just… I hadn’t known what to say. It’s so easy to think that in the moment you will have some perfectly lovely think to say that will put a cap on all your feelings, that will be just like in the books you read, but god you won’t. You almost certainly won’t. You’ll do it once and try to bottle the moment forever and it’ll burn through until it sears your hands. I had nothing. I had nothing now. Twilight sat eating fried rice like the world was fine, talking of this and that, mostly how… I needed to just be comfortable. He. Twilight. He. No more mental fumbling. He. I swallowed. Twilight talked about how much he was looking forward to finishing their current project, something about an autonomous arm of sorts, with some kind of multitool. Frankly it sounded like it was a bit terrifying, but he was excited. And I liked that excitement. I was happy listening. God that happiness is so fragile. We were going to have to talk about things, weren’t we? Even if they were talks that ended happily, we did have to have them. And god, where would we start? Names. Pronouns? Clothes I think we had kind of handled. Medicine? Us? Him? Us? Twilight may plan too aggressively but I can’t plan at all when its too sudden. My mind is a shattered mosaic, thoughts all scattered to the four corners.  On impulse, I touched Twilight’s hand and he smiled at me, brushing a bit of hair from his eyes more by habit than by necessity. I think. The smile endures. I want to keep the image of it in my mind. I want to savor it the way one savors a coffee in the evening after a dinner, slowly and leisurely and without urgency. I’ve never dated a man. I hated the whole “gold star lesbian” label but to some people, I would be one. I had never in my life been interested in a man. I hadn’t been repulsed by them, just uninterested. The men I knew did not share interests with me. Their talk did not move me the way that women had. I did not understand them in some way. At least so I said. I look at Twilight and I do not feel that way, but what does it mean? And what am I to do with that reality? Is my very continued interest an invalidation of who he is? That isn’t something Twilight brought up, so why do I? Should I? I wanted to crush my mind between two hands. What step is first, and what comes next? What? What? What? I squeeze his hand before releasing it.  And I don’t know. And he doesn’t know.  How’re you feeling? He asked. I say I am not sure. And he agrees.  What's there to be sure of? He offers. Really. I don’t have any certainties but two. That I know who I am, and that I want to be here, right now, with you. I only know the second one, I said. He smiled. Then let me help. We’ll go step by step.  I nodded. His eyes and my own locked. We all change, he said. Nothing’s constant, remember? And that’s not a bad thing. I remembered.  A river and the woman who walks through it. Heroclitus. I remember, I say. I love you, Twilight. And he loved me too.