The neon beer signs cast their familiar glow across the riverside bar’s weathered floorboards, a nostalgic backdrop for an 80s-themed night in my childhood town. Under the band’s flashing stage lights, everything sparkles just a bit too much, like memories filtered through a John Hughes lens. The crowd pulses with a peculiar mix of those too young to remember and those who probably set the actual trends we’re all trying to recreate, and I’m frozen at the edge of the dance floor, watching her.
She’s dressed as an 80s fairy princess, wrapped in white string lights that transform her into the queen of fireflies. The committee in my head notes the irony—for reasons too complicated to explain yet making perfect sense (which is saying a lot for these essays), she’s also somehow, thematically if not literally, a unicorn. They file this away under “Signs and Portents: Proceed with Caution.”
My ADHD brain spins like a disco ball, throwing fragments of thoughts in every direction, a million ideas fighting to escape at once. She notices—of course she notices—and suddenly launches into a story about Evander Holyfield boxing her cousin at a childhood skating rink. It’s quite possibly the most improbable sentence ever spoken, yet undeniably true, and somehow exactly what I need to hear at that exact moment.
She’s talking—more accurately, she’s weaving a tapestry of words so intricate it makes my own tendency toward verbal marathons seem like a casual jog, but there’s purpose in her chaos. Every few sentences, we ricochet off into tangents about the sobriety of people around us or the importance of sock/shoe sequencing, but she keeps gently steering us back to Holyfield throwing playful jabs under the spinning lights of a roller rink—an anchor disguised as a story, the kind of core memory that sounds like pure fiction but leaves truth glittering in its wake.
The BPD committee in my head calls an emergency session. They’ve seen this before—the instant recognition, the immediate click, the dangerous sense that finally, finally someone gets it. They’re waving red flags and showing PowerPoint presentations about my talent for spinning connection into delusions of granger, but my ADHD brain is too busy noticing how she uses her hands to punctuate her sentences, fairy lights trailing constellations through the air as she guides my scattered thoughts into something resembling orbit.
“I really need to pee,” she announces, bouncing slightly, “but first, I need you to slow down and breathe.” She’s been trying to get me to relax and pace myself all evening, so dedicated to the task that she’s ignored her own increasingly urgent biological needs for a good thirty minutes since first announcing them.
The committee groans. They’ve prepared for this. They have charts and graphs showing the statistical probability of me falling into the same patterns—the ones where I mistake understanding for attraction, where I confuse the relief of being heard with the flutter of romance. They’re right, of course. They’ve done their research, compiled their data, prepared their “Remember What Happened Last Time” presentation in neon pink Comic Sans.
But they can’t deny the poetry of her standing there, literally glowing, accidentally dressed as both fairy princess and metaphorical unicorn, telling the kind of story that could only be true because nobody would dare make it up.
But this is different.
No, really, I argue with myself, watching her explain the socioeconomic implications of our favorite 80s movies while simultaneously connecting it to a subtle commentary on comedy through truth versus humor through hyperbole, which somehow loops back to Holyfield and roller-skates. This isn’t about attraction (okay, maybe a little) or romance (nope nope nope) or the BPD’s desperate need to matter to someone (fine, this one’s always in play, but stay with me here). This is about recognition. About finding another member of your species in the wild.
The Thompson Twins start playing overhead—”Hold Me Now,” because the universe has a sense of irony that borders on the malicious. The committee is now in full crisis mode, passing emergency resolutions about maintaining emotional distance, while also noting with significant concern how her confidence and intellect make her stand twelve feet tall despite being perfectly, portably, power sized. They’re particularly alarmed by her eyes—piercing, unwavering, maintaining the kind of direct contact that usually sends me running but somehow feels like toasted marshmallows in a just-right mug of coco—and the way her rapid-fire thoughts emerge in crystalline clarity, hitting my brain like perfectly tuned music at 40MHz. The fairy lights aren’t helping, transforming her into some kind of concentrated chaos in a tiny, glowing package that checks far too many boxes on the committee’s “Warning Signs” spreadsheet.
“I might actually explode,” she says, interrupting her own dissertation on teaching me to channel my spastic energy into more contained movements (“because being this charged doesn’t mean you have to bounce off every wall”), “you can dance with more feet and less wingspan. Trust me—which absolutely connects back to Holyfield fighting Chad at the roller rink, I promise, just let me get there while I still have bodily control.”
And I do understand. I understand everything—the inability to pause a thought even when basic biological needs are screaming for attention, the way ideas connect like lightning in a summer storm, the desperate excitement of finding someone who can follow your mental leaps without asking for a map. But I also understand something else, something new: boundaries aren’t just walls we build to keep others out. Sometimes they’re fences we construct to keep ourselves in.
The committee eases back, their emergency lights shifting from red to orange as they realize I’m not about to dive headfirst into another emotional typhoon. They watch, suspicious but curious, as I tell her, “The bathroom’s not going anywhere, but this conversation should probably take a bio break before those fairy lights short-circuit from a poorly-timed giggle, and I’m not equipped to explain to the fire marshal why our unicorn princess caught fire mid-story.”
She laughs, a sound like arcade tokens spilling onto worn carpet, and finally rushes off toward the restroom. I watch her firefly dress bobbing through the crowd, a beacon of beautiful chaos in a sea of manufactured nostalgia. The committee tentatively approves a stay on their pending resolutions, filing it under “Healthy Recognition of Kindred Spirits Without Immediate Emotional Escalation,” though they make sure to note in the minutes that they’re maintaining DEFCON 3 surveillance levels, just in case.
When she returns, we pick up exactly where we left off, our thoughts tangling like cables behind a VCR. But now there’s something new in the static—an understanding that sometimes the most magical thing about finding your kind of weird in the wild is knowing you don’t have to capture it. Sometimes it’s enough to just dance in its glow, under the neon lights of a riverside bar, while Tears for Fears reminds us everybody wants to rule the world.
But maybe (anyone? Maybe?) it’s better to learn to rule ourselves first. I say, let’s see…