The intense heat of last week threatened to melt away all the golden trappings of this Solid Gold Summer like some gold-foil-wrapped chocolate bunny from the perilous Easter period – but summer has a way of proving itself invincible, refusing to yield even to its own incendiary machinations.
The music is magic as the Solid Gold dancers take to the stage of my hazy childhood memories – sequins sparkling in the roving spotlights, slicing through all the dramatic smoke effects as their limbs flail in impossible feats of human movement.
Glimmers of glory shimmer in the starry wide-eyed wonder of a little boy watching all the flashy magic playing out on the television. What might it feel like to spin in the middle of all those shards of glittering light – to be a disco ball with every light beam trained on you? Where all you have to do is spin and reflect the light back onto the world – the conduit, the vessel, the portal – resplendent in gold and mirrors and taking it all in only to give it right back in some incongruent generosity of spirit of which no one would ever quite believe you were capable. It’s not something we have come to expect of our golden icons.
When I think back to the boy I used to be, the kid who watched those Solid Gold dancers with rapture and transfixion, studying the way their sequined light pierced the stage night, I remember the ferocity he sought to capture, and how he vowed one day to be just as bewitching as the spectacle parading before him.
My dreams of gold read differently now, and I am starting to see things from a changed point of view. My vessel is solid gold; the rest of the world and its people may be gilded, facades and shells of empty, misguided brokenness, but I somehow remain whole, I remain true. I remain solid through and through. The tacit admission is that I’m just a little tarnished – an ironic flip of all that is expected from my sparkling superficiality, from all that has admittedly come before – with the graver implication being that I was tarnished by own hand and head. Overthinking and overanalyzing are the bane to many a Virgo, and I am far from an exception to this overwrought conundrum.
Yet it is precisely at such times when I remind myself that I still have the power to enthrall and enchant, as I’m reminded by friends and strangers alike, in ways overt and covert because nobody willingly gives me any flowers despite how much they know I love them. Or maybe it’s because they know how much I love them, and love has never been easy to come by for me.
The rest of the world gets the show then, and for anyone who is still reading, that goes for you too. The ones I seek to reach are infuriatingly unaware of these spoils. My golden splendor spins with purpose only for itself, for the sake of spinning. It’s something to do, something to fill the mind when more disruptive thoughts might derail an entire summer.
