Moon Day is a holiday in our household. I think it started as kind of a joke when the kid was little, when every new thing presented an opportunity to make something new and kind of silly that was just ours, the three of us.

At some point it got more serious, in the sense that it’s still a very casual holiday but it’s no longer just something we flippantly say in the morning on July 20. “Happy Moon Day!” We have cake. We commemorate Apollo’s landing. This year we had a party, with a ton of food and friends and board games. I made a layer cake and my kid and my oldest nephew helped me decorate it with craters and edible silver spray paint.

Things change. Things that were silly become sacred. Things that filled the whole of your sky like the brightest, fullest harvest moon of all slip away and shrink to a silver sliver and then, sometimes, they’re gone.

Earlier today I told the kids a couple stories about my childhood, which happened less than a mile from where I’m typing this now. They were sweet memories, vague recollections of happy times, populated largely with people I may never see again. I left that part out, because it is Moon Day and today is not a sad holiday. It’s a day for commemorating an act of courage and hope and stunning human insolence. Today is for remembering we can take steps that those who came before us never dared even conceive of. It’s a very Queer holiday, when you think about it.

I had to spend part of today re-emphasizing a boundary with someone who took me and my wife’s coming out badly. It wasn’t a happy experience. It hurt and I second-guessed myself all the way through it. And I thought the same thing I thought when I was first preparing to share our news: you know this could be a goodbye. And who knows, maybe it is.

Sometimes lights go out and don’t rekindle. Sometimes people can’t change. Sometimes you leave things behind you didn’t want to lose, because they are too heavy to carry with you on the next part of the trip to whatever impossible place you are going.

But who knows. Sometimes against all odds a ship made of featherweight foolishness is lofted up on currents of math and audacity and touches a new world. Sometimes the once-dark moon is in a waxing crescent, and the world holds its breath and a new thing happens, inconcievable, incandescent.

Sometimes it’s Moon Day. Sometimes that’s enough to get by on for now.