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This is the confession of a fool. I call myself this not because I hope to through roundabout manipulation convince my audience, whoever you are, to find me sympathetically pitiable, but because I am in all manners, through behavior and action, an honest-to-god fool. It's not merely my formal way of speaking, nor my at-times awkward gestures or taste in clothing which conglomerate to design the fool I make myself to be. I am a fool perhaps because of all of these things, a self-appointed reject who through convenience points his finger at everything but himself. That is why I am a fool; not by action, but inaction. Every choice I refuse is an opportunity lost, a doorway beyond which, at the risk of sounding naïve, I may or may not find my destiny. Behind it could very well be the man with whom I share the relationship I always wanted, or, for all I know, it could be the moment my life ends in tragedy. I will never know, because I do not make such choices. I combat them so frequently I don't even realize that my lack of doing so is, in fact, choosing. So comfortable have I become with inaction that I have allowed myself to be swallowed by indifference, which after so many years of dwelling in has become a blanket under which I can feign both warmth and obscurity.

I do, in fact, often to my displeasure, still exist, and even beneath the blanket shiver. It is a dark place. It is a lonely place. I am very tired of living there.

It's love, or what I feel must be love, that brought me to this place. The fool I am, I allowed myself to fall in love with a man who could not possibly return my affection. The dream, however, was fierce enough that even despite the staggeringly unrealistic odds, I clung to the lone strand of hope I willed into existence by sheer force of denial. I've dangled there a long time, praying that with enough persistence and gravity's fortune I might unspool enough thread to reveal the vulnerable organs of his soul, exposing him to the lover I longed him to see in me.

Passion wants, but rarely receives. You can choose in agony to scream at and in an instant come to loathe the object of your passion when your advances are swatted down. Or, as I have done, you can store it inside, foolishly allowing it to well up and over until every pore gushes with the hurt of never knowing what might or might not be. One allows you to move on; the other paralyzes you, and in that stasis you lie awake at night wondering what could be, what might be, what will be if and when you finally let your secret out.

And so we come to the thrust of my confession, or at least, where I feel the inklings of a metamorphosis. It is the turning of a chapter in my life, resting upon a scale with unquantifiable amounts of possibility and peril. Exhausted by the fruitlessness of my inaction, I have decided that this is the time I must strike. I am determined, for all the years burdened by the self-destructive fog of misperception, to show my hand and accept the consequences. An expert gambler would never stake everything blindly, but I am no statistician. I am, as I have thoroughly established, a fool, a man of wandering emotion. Where the world of most is filled with concepts like common sense and responsibility, my world exists above the clouds, often so far beyond that not only is it impossible to see the forest for the trees, the forest itself, the mountains, the oceans, sometimes the entire planet, is an indistinguishable blur.

Despite my introspection, which I cannot fault you for assuming is the symptom of a troubled mind, I am not, I don't think, in exceptionally bad sorts. I am perhaps generally troubled, as I imagine any person who so frequently dwells within the merry-go-round of his mind would be, but I am at a party. Tonight marks the end of a memorable weekend shared among friends, an orgy of social activity we within the community refer to as a furry convention. This party, known as a dead dog party, is the kind of anything-goes event routinely held during the last night of a convention. There is no shortage of alcohol at a dead dog party. They are loud, they are packed, and they are full of colorful personalities.

Where the average person might find such a party strange, to phrase things delicately, I find myself among kindred spirits. Each of us is, in our way, a wanderer off the beaten path. We are gamers, we are otakus, we are performers, intellectuals and pariahs alike. Perhaps the most publicly known and defining aspect of our culture is fursuiting, the occasion where a person wears a costume representing any variety of species you can imagine, real or otherwise. Fursuits, I find, are a means of liberation. Inside, you cease to be yourself; you are reborn without the boundaries and inhibitions of humanity. The shy become outgoing. The outgoing become jovial. There had been a time where I misunderstood why a person would eagerly take the guise of a living cartoon, and I can't remember when things turned, but now I find myself at home among them. Just the presence of a person in costume brightens the room, and here, among what I in the moment consider family, my anxiety melts away.

As I sit alone upon the couch, watching guests mingle, I feel a sliver of what I long to feel throughout my life, and in that minute of what I am certain is real happiness, my mind travels. I know that I should let this moment, however fleeting, be what it is, but I become reminded how once the convention ends, I will return to the misadventure of daily life, the repetitious cycle of work and sleep interspersed with brief intermissions to keep me just enough sustained. The rut will continue to deepen until the groove is so worn escape becomes impossible. I'll permit myself to huddle beneath my blanket where it's safe and warm. I will lie there, exanimate, hopeless, misery creeping like icy fingers searching for my throat until I can take it no longer, and then...

I apologize. These are not the types of thoughts I should entertain, especially here. I try constantly to remember, as I have been advised many times, to live in the present. It's true; too frequently I attach myself to the future or past. I think about what I could have done differently to make my life what I want it to be, or how, instead, to position myself so I can someday emerge the princely being I believe is necessary to obtain the affection of my heart's desire.

Peter, why am I not good enough for you? Who do I have to be to earn your love?

I think about Peter. Handsome, driven, accomplished, desired. It would be a victory of no small consequence to experience his embrace, not just to feel his arms around me but for it to be the kind of sincere embrace only lovers share. I've dreamed what it must feel like for our lips to touch. I know the physical sensation; it's the passion I long for, the missing element that makes the difference between a meal and a banquet. But I, the broken fool wandering aimlessly between the soaring high of his dreams and sunken reality of his life, cannot reconcile the two, and must accept that what is, is. There is neither lasting romance, nor inescapable tragedy. When one in his mind lives torn between either extreme, he is as I am a fool. I strive to accept that the pedestal Peter exists upon is an imaginary construct, a manifestation of my wishes breathed into flesh. When tested it cannot possibly survive the battering of reality. Yet the heart pulses with irrational fever, and no amount of reason can sway it to believe hope is lost, nor that the silhouette of romance I desire is anything less than possible.

When I am gone, if all that lingers in the hearts of whose lives I touch is the single flash of a strobe, I hope it is a blinding flash, where for that moment it arrests them, brings to their face a smile, a smirk, anything but indifference. When I think of Peter, I think of every ray of sun that ever warmed the earth. His is the breed of champions, whose veins, with pounding thunder, tap into the belly of the universe. I think of that, and I think of me. People like Peter are the children of infinity. In one breath they gulp the life experience of a thousand of me. Maybe it's something they're born to do. Maybe what flows through them compels them to pluck every kind of life's fruit and imbibe its nectar, leaving behind a trail of cores for we mere mortals to study, to measure and display, to imagine how glorious a belly full of the stuff must be. And maybe, if through clever analysis and careful plotting we correctly chart the trail, we too might peep above the hedge and glimpse the garden of destiny.

Walt Whitman said that if we should have need of him again, all we need is but gaze beneath our bootsoles. As I gaze down to my gray paws, I consider the strangeness of my life. Is this escape? Is it community? Are we creating something, or are we merely society's fringe? I take off my head and peer across the suite. Even in costume, I am still just a man. My value, however remarkable or unremarkable perceived, has no bearing on its achievement. Each of us spreads tendrils that affect the world in ways we cannot know. It is a tumbling, the aggregating of every heart, like synapses thrumming through collective wiring, each joined by thought and deed, where for all the nectar supped, all the frontiers charted, even infinity's children share our mortal trappings; leading or led each of us stretches our fingers for something to make the burden of existence bearable, some blanket to warm and console us.

To answer myself, however strange or mundane my life may be, my passion and I choose each other in equal measure. As I look across the end of the room, I see Peter in costume, pantomiming actions and entertaining fans. At first I am filled with longing, but as I watch, I think about my aspiration. Am I brave enough to strike? The statisticians are right, I tell myself. You can't risk it all on a nine in the hole with two aces on the table and the dealer's got a grin. It's better under the blanket. It's a comfortable deception, a hideaway, Bag End of fools. There's no harm there, just calm, quiet desperation so slowly sneaking that by the time it has you bound, no alarm was ever raised. People simply accept that's the way you've always been, like Schrodinger's cat simultaneously alive and dead, until at last, after a lifetime deep in the rut of work and sleep with brief intermissions interspersed, there is no mistaking the latter.

The dealer is bluffing. In every life are moments, sometimes circumstantial, oftentimes designed, where, if captured, your destiny splits and the person you were in that instant ceases while the person you become journeys anew, unpredictable, kaleidoscopic. I shift in my seat. Perhaps my contemplation over the triviality of grasping one's identity among a group of escapists collectively playing pretend is what makes me a fool, but I am convinced, here of all places, there exist some truths it takes a fool to tell. If you can seize your moment, whatever your passion, wherever upon a hierarchy you fall, you are an unstoppable creature, a child of infinity, undeterred by failure, irrepressed by judgment, understood by few, admired by all.