dear me!

identifying I scrambled my first name in a club and when challenged at the door of another suddenly improvised my surname. It’s not quite a drag-name but it will do. What a world of contrasts we live in. One minute the fawn and I are in tender embrace lost together in the wood where there are no names and no nouns, and then the wood ends,- “I’m a Fawn!” it cried out in a voice of delight, “and, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. And fear and alarm have appeared, and in the world of words people are screaming at each other across the emptiness of the internet. We always end up identifying ourselves. “And you are….?” So much delight, so much reassurance when we can “identify as…” even before we “present as”. Now there’s a character, ahead are the pronouns and in the not-so-distant distance are the Culture Wars. We should have stayed in the wood. Should we?