Jump in so we can stack up some more memories, just like we did for #GGEnRoute. :3

YEY

Osteria Romana’s Instagram— just in case!

Maenk and her obssession with Sunscreen SPF 250++

DROPIE DROPIE

WE LOB YOU, Icoberry—the strawberry princess! So glad you joined. You make this community feel even warmer already, and we’re genuinely so happy to have you here <3

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Dearest children of earth and eclipse, wanderers carved from stardust and saltwater grief, creatures of flesh, folklore, and feverish imagination, thank you for gathering beneath the candlelight of our little universe and leaving pieces of yourselves upon the table of our #GGDineDiary.

To those who arrived like comets, like storms, like soft hymns carried through dying constellations, thank you for staining the afternoon with your laughter, your madness, your tenderness, your beautiful ruin. Every story you spilled still clings to the walls like perfume trapped inside an abandoned cathedral.

The plates are empty now. The wine has long gone cold. Yet the remnants of your voices still drift through the corners of the room like sacred ghosts refusing to leave. What a gorgeous catastrophe it was!
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“Forwards, beckon, rebound…” ♪ ₊˚ ♬

The eve of the seventeenth has settled over us like a shroud, and the kitchen of Gilded Gliders Grand Manor smells entirely of burnt sugar, sharp lemon zest, and the unmistakable, earthy stench of a wet parrot. It’s a beautiful wreckage, a frantic sort of alchemy, and I wouldn’t trade it for a single second of peace. What a pure friction.

Originally, the plan for IDAHOBIT was supposed to be a solitary affair. Just me, some flour, and the echoing expanse of the manor, baking something passably decent to mark the seventeenth of May. But pride isn’t the sort of thing you can keep buried under the floorboards, is it? It sprawls. It reaches out, entirely on its own terms. Before I really grasped what I was doing, the invitation had already bled outward. The two wretched bloomers of Pollen & Poetry, Baba Michael, and Charmaine are here now, filling the heavy, silent corners of this massive house with their own distinct warmth. Even the menagerie has joined the fray. Picasso, Islavia’s brilliantly obnoxious parrot, is currently perched on a high shelf, screaming what sounds suspiciously like “More butter!” at regular intervals. Down below, Shiloh’s cat, Gigiano, is doing that inherently feline thing of winding herself tightly around everyone’s ankles, risking immediate flattening. And just outside the large kitchen window, my Krystal watches it all. To any untrained eye, he’s just a standard black horse, but I know the majestic, heavy wings he keeps tucked away under that clever disguise. His dark eyes are perfectly still, reflecting the warm, flickering glow of the hearth.

“Watch the bloody feathers, Picasso,” I mutter, brushing a stray grain of sugar off my sleeve.

This day, it matters. It is so terribly easy to forget, when you are safe inside thick stone walls like these, that IDAHOBIT (International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia) was established back in 2004 for a very stark reason, to draw global attention to the violence and systemic discrimination the LGBTQIA+ community still faces. May 17th wasn’t just plucked out of thin air, either. It marks the exact day in 1990 when the World Health Organization finally, mercifully, removed homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases. It’s a day of deep reflection, a day of memory, and a day of fierce, rooted autonomy, a haunting reminder that our existence was once written down as a sickness, and that we had to claw our way out of those definitions with bleeding fingers.

Looking around the room at Shiloh, at Islavia, at Baba Michael, at Charmaine, at the sheer, unapologetic noise of everyone just existing here, the whole weight of the day hits somewhere bruised and hushed in my chest. You realise pretty quickly that baking a few loaves of bread has very little to do with the food itself. It’s the act of throwing the doors open. Sanctuary is a fragile, ghostly thing, something you have to actively scrape together with your own hands because the cold world outside certainly won’t hand it to you. Right now, there is flour dusting every surface like ash, the din is loud enough to rattle my teeth, and my heart feels stupidly, entirely full. Pride is coming, and heaven knows, I think we’re ready for it. Let the floodgates open. Truth be told, I’m prepared to leave a piece of myself in the dirt for it. I am braced for the slaughter!
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