we are old, love / goodnight my love

All right, so I'm not exactly old, yet. But I was standing at the till in Sainsbury's with a raw chicken in one hand and a bag of low-fat wine gums in the other and peering woefully at the "Under 21" sign, informing me about ID and alcohol purchases. And yes, it makes no qualitative difference, but not being under twenty-one is still odd.

An odd sort of birthday. There was, due to a strange sequence of circumstances, the tail-end of a cast party in our kitchen last night, and they were still making a noise at half six in the morning, so I picked up my blankets and pillows in the early-morning light and went to sleep curled in a foetal ball in the windowseat. I woke up with a start at half eleven with nothing before my eyes other than the drop. Someone said later that it would make a good beginning to a novel: "On the morning of my twenty-first birthday, I awoke to find myself falling from a third-floor window..."

Yes. Thank god for double glazing. I got myself up with minimal creaking and went into college, to find my parents had sent me a bottle of rosé and a ginormous cake by post. (Don't ask how, really.) Maria and I did some food shopping - my flatmates had made elaborate dinner plans, about which I was at the time wisely asking nothing - and then I sat in the kitchen and waited for the world to come to me.

Which it did. absinthe_shadow appeared and we had a brief discussion about fandom as female space, which got rapidly derailed by foulds arriving and talking about cheese. We have discovered, much to our joint chagrin, that we know the Aeneid. As in, we can recite it to each other. I am profoundly impressed and disturbed, and strangely happy, too. I am happy. People came and made me happy - shimgray did Bonsai Kitten impressions, Maria made tiramisu, deepbluemermaid presented me with lovely lovely minty chocolate and told me stories about New Zealand. My lovely wife jacinthsong came and we sat almost a metre apart and were not co-dependent, and lizziwig gave me the BEST CARD EVER. It is enormous and made of and with love, and I was filled with more joy.

The one thing my parents didn't send, as my mum somewhat emotionally informed me this morning, was birthday candles. So we used Diwali tealights instead (which shimgray took a lovely picture of) and I was so happy, I forgot to make a wish. I don't need one, right now. I had to chuck people out with considerable reluctance - the flatmates were gearing up with roast chickens of doom - and suddenly, without my noticing, I'd been steered into a chair at the end of a table and was looking down at a grand vista of food. Everything I like is made of sugar, so we had cake and rosé and baked apples and honey parsnips and roast chicken with blackcurrant jam and fairy cakes and sausage rolls and strawberry jelly and rich Ethiopian coffee. I have no idea where they were hiding so much food. (In fact, I missed this; I've sort of drifted away from my flatmates in recent months, and forgotten what wonderful people they really are. Somewhere in the middle of the hubbub of conversation, Liya said, into a space of silence, "Your ex-girlfriend's mother is Alan Rickman?"

Do you need context for a remark like that? I don't think so. There was full-on hysteria without any need for such trivialities.)

So, a quiet night, winding down into further quiet, coffee and cake, and I am still filled with love for everyone. People wrote me fic, too! absinthe_shadow wrote me "Five Times Geoffrey Tennant was happy" into my birthday card, and it had the same poetic, utterly stilling quality all her writing has. It was beautiful.

hathy_col wrote me "five things the Doctor never said to his companions", which is made of WIN;

rosariotijeras wrote me "five things Geoffrey Tennant definitely didn't do in the asylum", which is simultaneously hilarious and terribly sad;

nos4a2no9 wrote me Deserted, which is about what happened when Benton Fraser saw the beach for the first time, and it's quiet, and melancholy, and horribly sad. Love.

And pinkishmew wrote me the first of "five times Teddy Lupin was performatively genderqueer", which I have to admit I will also try myself.

(I also want to try "five things Rodney McKay thinks the Ancients should have invented, but didn't because they had no concept of pop culture", and I did suggest to the room at large this afternoon "five reasons Remus Lupin should not be dead", but that just degenerates into "because! because! because!" so I may desist from that.)

...so. In six months from now, I'm going to leave this place that I love and have loved so deeply. On my twenty-second birthday, a new president of the United States will take office. I don't know who it will be, and I don't know where I'll be to see it - Delhi? Japan? Formby Point? Cambridge, MA? - but I do know that I woke up this morning and I did not fall, and I will not fall, and the world is all laid out below my window, beautiful and lit and waiting.