Raise a glass of starstuff and chase your living dream.
May it always be that we are more than what we seem,
living by example, until our separate brilliance
can rise-
that wild example, those mismatched eyes.
I’m heartbroken that David Bowie has died. He showed so many of us that it was a Good Thing to be brilliant and creative and freaky and bisexual and Fucking Strange. I’m just one little blip of light in the sea of raised lighters today, but I’m holding my own as high as my arm will allow.
I will grieve, and then I will continue to sing loud and to be weird and to Not Apologize for it, because when I was at my most young and most lost, someone dear to me made me a Bowie mix-tape, and I listened, and the stars came out again, and I have not lost them since.
Raise your glass. Blast “Ziggy Stardust” if it helps. Or Outside, or “Wild-eyed Boy from Freecloud”, or Earthling, or or or. Write your own. Put on glitter eyeliner today (every damn day) if you want. I will be right there with you.
When I was fifteen, I dressed as Ziggy for Halloween. There are pictures. I’ll find them.
The following February, for my sixteenth birthday, I threw a costume party. Invited all my friends. The only person who showed up was my bestie who’d stayed over the night before. We dressed up as Jareth and Sarah and did not care that nobody else came.
I was writing bizarre, nonlinear Diamond Dogs fanfic before I knew what fanfic was. Possibly before most of us knew what fanfic is. Printing it out on a dot matrix printer. I may have to find that, too, embarrassing or not. 🙂
Here’s to the innovators. Here’s to the starfolk. Here’s to the most fearless, most inventive of them all. We are fortunate to have existed while he was around. We are blessed to live in a time and in dimensions where his voice and truth can echo on and on.
Raise your glass.
Turn it up.