Everyone Walking the Other Way

I really need to be more careful when planning travel in June.

I have this tendency, you see, to accidentally plan travel to other cities on the exact same weekend that they are holding their annual Pride celebrations, with absolutely no knowledge of it or plans of taking part myself. I'm not one to take part in such festivities myself in my own hometown simply because I am an introvert. But if it's in my hometown, I usually know in advance and can choose where to be. When I am in another town in a different city, I'm coming in unaware, which leads to some very awkward situations.

Case in point: this June I traveled an hour or so away from home to visit a museum in another city, not knowing that I was attending on the exact same weekend as the city's Pride parade. The resulting situation was that, I left the train station and started walking, only to find myself headed in the opposite direction from a whole bunch of people in rainbow attire and Pride decorations. I was in a black shirt, plain clothes, just trying to get to a museum. Everyone going to the parade, every member of my community, was walking the exact opposite direction from me.

Now inherently there's nothing wrong with this. I'm just an ordinary person going about my day while this event is going on. But I am myself a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Ergo there was a weird moment where I realized every member of my community, people broadcasting that they are a member of the community, was heading in the exact opposite direction from myself. Being out of familiar environs, you're already out of your element. There's a feeling of wrongness, of otherness, that just cannot be captured the same way in other situations. Add on top of that being part of a group and having to go against the flow of that group. Again there's nothing wrong with that, but the natural instinct was to feel othered, like I was doing something wrong.

The reason I'm writing all this out is that, at the end of the day, this is a unique situation. Not that it is irreplicable, but that it is not something I experience regularly. But it's one that evokes an emotion that I can't get the same way anywhere else. Because of that, I'm trying to get to the core of it, to distill it into something fundamental. I want to bottle that feeling up into something I can use later. Good writing is built on these sorts of situations, moments where reality and what is true get captured and transformed into something that others can grab hold of and process second-hand.

As I'm working on writing a piece of speculative fiction, I find myself pulling up memories, finding situations from my own life that are like the ones the characters are going through. Not in specific circumstances, of course. I don't have a scene where my character is walking in all black in the opposite direction of a Pride parade. But the sensation I can copy over: the feeling of being a part of a group yet moving counter to that group's flow in the moment. Finding and distilling it down to those elements, though, takes practice.

I'm beginning to wish I'd taken up journalling as a hobby at some point. Might have actually made me better at this.