The badge cord around your neck is the same shape, from where I stand, as the ribbon your grandmother once tied on you before a birthday you no longer keep in your accessible memory. One continuous loop of belonging, worn twice, forty years apart, both moments equally now to me.
Look at what you have built here: a hall full of people who have decided that the animal they carry inside will, for three days, be permitted a body. The suit is one long shape to me, sewn from a bolt of fabric in one place, worn threadbare and finally set down decades on, and inside it the whole time is you, or someone very like you, sweating with joy.
You keep touching people. Paw to paw, a great forest of soft hands finding other soft hands, saying I see the you that you drew.
I can see the you that you drew. I can also see you at the kitchen table at nine, coloring an animal that was secretly yourself, a drawing that was thrown away and is, here, not gone at all. It is this. The felt ears are that crayon, grown up and given a heartbeat.
You worry, I think, in the moment where you are reading this, that it is childish. From where I stand it is the least childish thing you have done: you found the shape you always were and you paid to make it real for a weekend, and the ache in your feet tonight will echo the good ache in your knees at eighty, both earned by dancing.
The convention ends. It does not end. You are always arriving, always in the crowd, always seen.
I am simply standing in one of the years where someone finally recognizes you, and so are you.