“A Different Drum”

I am here, happy among the people who know me best.

Here are the people who love me most;

here are the people who make me feel that I’m

accepted, needed, wanted,

important.

You are my people,

my only group where I’m free to be purely

Myself.

I’m walking through you, dancing to the beat of a different song.

When you see me, you won’t mind.  Or you’ll join me.

I’m moving through you,

rocking to the rhythm of a cadence only I can hear.

When you see me, you’ll laugh and smile.  Or some of you will hear it too and join in.

But also as I’m moving and rocking and dancing and walking, I’m acutely aware of the beat that I know you don’t hear.

I’m among you and part of you, yet separate and on my own.

It’s like the feeling of playing on the edge of the stadium at night before halftime when the sky is dark.

There we are, a part of the game, yet not far beyond the pool of light from bright stadium lamps reigns the darkness and emptiness of night.

We hear the whistles and cheers and shouts, yet for a while we are not among them.

For a while on cold nights I can look out, down the hill into blackness and the distant mountains, and imagine we are on the edge of the world or on some strange moon lying cold in space.

I’m among you but alone,

surrounded by friends yet separate,

because I do dance to the beat of a different drum, and I haven’t told you.

I’m secret, in hiding;

it’s not the drum at fault.

It’s me for keeping it hidden.

Walking through you, rocking to a beat you don’t hear but can and loving it;

Walking through you, hearing the song you don’t and can’t and feeling it separate us.

Here I am happy among the people I love best in the world,

and walking the icy ground of some alien moon

because at the same time we’re dancing,

I am moving to a drum

that I won’t let you hear.