It never ends well. Every time, I slip, or I run into someone who knew me before the latest attempt at silence, or I finally decide I can trust my new friends with something more than the glossiest, most marketable version of myself. Belief in my own alien nature aside, I’ve never been able to stick to a story for long, and eventually it just seems easier to tell the truth as I know it. And you know what?

It’s worse. Every single time, it’s worse.

When I tell people right out the gate, they can decide that I’m quirky or decide that I’m deluded, and either way, they build their mental models of me with that particular trait in place. When I don’t tell them …

When I don’t tell them, I’m messing with them. Or I’m not just deluded, I’m dangerously disconnected from reality, since apparently I know I’m not normal and I chose to hide it for as long as I could. Or they laugh at me. That’s almost the worst. People who find out I’m an alien as soon as they meet me, even though I can’t prove it and I look human and I’ve been on this planet for more than thirty years, which seems like a long time for an advance scout, they sometimes laugh. But it’s a short laughter, a disbelieving laughter, the kind of laughter that’s waiting for a punchline. The people who find out later laugh like I am the punchline, like there’s no point in pretending I’m ever going to be anything else.

I wasn’t dismissing Roxanna’s idea because it came from her, or because I didn’t like her and knew she didn’t particularly like me. I was dismissing it because it had come from my mother, from my therapist, from my favorite English teacher, and from myself. Because it had come from virtually every person I’d ever trusted, and if it hadn’t worked when it was born from a place of love and compassion and genuine concern, it certainly wasn’t going to work when it came from a place of “you’re weird, stop being weird.”

The strangest thing about Roxanna was how such an enormous weirdo could survive being continually judgmental and abrasive, yet not see how these two sides of her personality were in conflict. Lucas and Roxanna would never have met if not for the overlap in their respective weirdnesses luring them both to Burning Man, where love on the playa had blossomed into love in my living room three nights a week. But she sure did feel like she was entitled to judge Mandy and me.