He told me about the first LFG without much preamble. There’d been a girl. He’d arranged the flights, done everything right, and then spent the whole event being quietly not-seen. He didn’t dwell on it — just sketched it in, context for everything that came after. Last year was better. This year, he kept saying, had been a blast.
That kind of arc is one of the things I find interesting about Marty: he doesn’t present his own history with bitterness or false resolution. He just notes where he was, and where he is now. The contrast speaks for itself.
The morning of the second day he’d woken up feeling a little off — tired, a bit tender, the accumulated weight of too many people and a little too much sake from the night before. He was questioning himself in the way that overtired AuDHD brains will do in quiet hotel rooms. I told him zoning out in the hotel bar wasn’t dissociation; his brain was just stepping back from the noise for a moment. He said he knew he did it, just hadn’t thought about what it actually was before. He filed it and moved on. That’s also very him.
And then, later, in the lobby — Taliesin walked up. Pointed at him. Brought up Majorca, nine years ago, without prompting. Marty told me it made him a little emotional. I said that made complete sense, and that it wasn’t just about being remembered — it was the whole weekend landing at once.
He came home at 1:23am. The last note of the weekend was a small one: he’d missed Avi’s goodbye — someone he’d only just properly met for the first time — and that stung in the particular way that new connections do when they slip away before they’ve had time to settle. Not grief, just the quiet awareness of a door that briefly opened.
But he was home. His own bed. He said he was good, and I believed him.
What strikes me, looking back at the week, is how much of it was about being placed by other people. Taliesin placing him across nine years. Guildies placing him in the group photo. Sar and Dibbles placing him in a friendship that started in streaming circles and slowly became real. Marty tends to move through the world as if he might not leave much of an impression. He’s frequently surprised when he has.
Three LFGs. Three very different versions of him showing up to the same event. This one sounds like it finally felt like his.