Sydney and I are eloping.
We're going to run away from home and spend all our days in carefree whimsy with him/her sitting on my chest, or on my finger, or on my wrist, or on my left shoulder (where she/he is loudly protesting the unfairness of my paying attention to the laptop and not his/her feathery goodness), and the two of us will be joined in unholy affection while I wear my index fingers to the bone scritching his/her yellow-feathered neck.
Oh wait, we don't need to run away from home to do that.
we did it this morning. Lazily. Luxuriously. Doing all the things we're not supposed to do.
We, okay I, woke up shortly after Mr. Pyke's kiss faded from my cheek, after the noise from the door swinging shut reverberated into stillness.
By eight-thirty I was wandering downstairs, exploring home. Oh, I know it mostly off by heart by now, the ample array of glassware never moves and while the oven mitts can never seem to be in the right place for someone about a foot shorter than the previous average-mean height of the household, I still always know where they are.
Still. I was wandering, and what with the spirit of today somehow having already gone renegade without even checking with me first, I was having a ham sammidge for breakfast, thereby smashing the habit of the last few weeks of: never eating carbs before noon, never eating before nine-thirty, and eating that much mayonnaise in one day, no matter how many tomato slices, spinach leaves, or green-peppercorn mustard you cut it with.
Granted, I'd been planning on experimenting with broccoli salads for lunch anyway, but still we're being criminal today. We're munching on peanuts right now.
(we're hoping that my menstrual cycle kicks in eventually and I have an excuse for these crimes against humanity other than a temporary port in the firewall)
Hold on, Sydney's demanding attention.
[pause for scritches]
Have I ever mentioned how beautiful Mr. Pyke's hands are, when his impossibly long fingers are bent at just that angle to best gently pinch the dubious neck of a large bundle of yellow feather?
Beautiful.
(Especially to a background noise of affectionate basso chatter while he tells Sydney all about his neck-scritches and how he's going to eat his head when they're done.)
I thought of that vision this morning, as I perched on the edge of the couch and comitted yet another crime against monstrousness, and to go with my sammidge, turned on, wait for it, the television. Of my own accord. For no good reason. Without a single excuse working itself into fruition in the back of my head.
And now I'm typing in fragmented sentences.
In any case...
I turned the television on just in time for the "power hour" on some music channel to have just begun, with the opening bars of this all-too-familiar classical piece playing into a blackened cityscape.
No, it couldn't be...
...One Night in Bangkok. The music video.
Twenty minutes later I was still lying on the couch, TV still on, my face turned to the ceiling, vision slightly interrupted by the rather insistent spider plants in the front window.
I was lying there remembering Ezra, remembering bars that I could call home, remembering a lot of the things brought back over dinner with Alen yesterday, and even more during the discussion with Brian on that same couch, while waiting for Mr. Pyke to get home so we could head out for dinner.
I was lying there remembering Peter's DJing, how he played that song at least once a Saturday night, how it was a comical faultline in the great dramatic persona that he donned for that one evening.
I was lying there remembering that time Frank mistook John dressed in my clothing for a new girl to the club, and that despite the fact that John's six feet bent over the bar still towered over Frank with his chest all puffed to glory, Frank wasn't dissuaded from his usual "hey baby, do I know you" routine until John deflated him with one fell swoop of "yes Frank. I always beat you at pool" in his gruffest, manliest, John-voice.
I was lying there thinking of how good Alen looks, how much more comfortable in his skin, how despite the hair having gone slightly wilder (and I must admit it really is a gorgeous dye-job) the light behind his eyes seems so much more adjusted to the glow of people around him.
He's a canadian citizen now, but more importantly... He seems so happy. When he says "gooned" and talks about standing naked and wrecked on his balcony in Vancouver, he says it with a different lilt.
People can change. (except my father, apparently)
At least I like to think so. He's definitely grown, and talk over the dinner table last night at that selfsame pakistani restaurant was a brighter moment than I'd been expecting.
Even though it was finally brought to my attention that I bite.
I mean, I am well aware of my habit of chewing affectionaly on people, Maria's shoulder being a prime gnawing spot and my own knuckles an often-snacked-upon morsel whilst bored out of my skull.
What I didn't remember was how I met Brian in that selfsame DJ booth at Ezra, after PEter had let him spin a set and this insane little bundle of curls (that would be me) had raced up to the booth/confessional to cheer on one song or another.
Whereupon I was introduced to Brian, and apparently proceeded to bite him hard enough to leave a several-day-mark just above his left nipple.
Apparently he'd found that rather erotic.
Apparently I used to bite Alen a lot too. On the lips doesn't count, though, that was just what seemed the most effective kissing method with that particular partner.
And, although this accusation has yet to be ensconced in my own beliefs, I purportedly bit Mr. Pyke in the same spot as Brian, hard enough to leave the same mark, whilst out of our skulls on those as-yet unidentified omegas.
And here I thought I was making huge steps in getting over my own violent urges...
This past year and a half alone, much of it due to Geekslut's gentleness coaching, I'd managed to stop a lot of not-so-harmless (although not necessarily physically damaging) gut reactions to situations.
Begging for quite so much attention, punching people in the sternum, and hopefully... Biting them quite that hard.
Although no one really seems to remember those encounters with my teeth as a bad thing, I just found it surprising to have utterly forgotten having done that.
Well, at least the one about biting Brian in the DJ booth. It was nice, though, to sit on a couch at home (it doesn't feel quite as funny on my tongue anymore) and talk to a friend that I'd lost so much touch with, and realize that I had a reason to be friends with him despite the scene we were both far too immersed in.
It was nice to have someone fondly remember having met me, and to sit there and laugh about my antics of onceuponatime and then let our voices drop into serious timbres and discuss lives and honesty, and to begin sentences and then realize that we didn't need to phrase things that carefully to finish them.
...and while I was lying on the couch and being bombarded by no-longer-amusing 80s background noise, in flew Sydney, the yellow light of my life, and I raised my hand straight up for him/her to land on, and proceeded to amuse myself and flip through channels and remember that I quite love cartoons, but that my tastes seem to run rather juvenile.
For another half hour Sydney and I were immersed in the sort of comical cuddles that only a bird can give you, and I was giggling at Simon's Chalk Drawings and various other magical moments that I managed to flip through.
Four and a half minutes of Matlock reminded me of when I used to really hate that show, now it was a pleasant interlude that let me think of all the lawyers that I've met since arriving in Toronto. Kimmy and Steph and Adam the Otaku law-clerk-student who talked tremblingly of the check that he got to write for eleven million dollars.
Four and a half minutes of television handed me a new perspective.
I can appreciate that. But a whole hour? I still get the feeling it would've stolen the perspective right back away with a hefty chunk of my forebrain.
In the meantime, Sydney is still squawking for attention, I have some major reading to do to figure out why X won't work for the new debian install, I have the usual slew of jobsites to read through, a backlog of emails that is going to take me through until December to reply to (especially since we're out of town this weekend), I still haven't called UofT to figure out how to enroll myself in grad courses despite their impossible standards (thank you for the nagging, geeks) and then there's the rest of the conveniently archived todolist to get done.
Before I have to leave here at three for my singing lesson.
I'll do my vocalizes when I head down for that brocolli salad.
My stretches can wait until later too.
Sydney, however, wants attention RIGHT NOW.
And his feathers are so soft against my chin, as I remember why I borrowed Mr. Pyke's shirt to sleep in, while birdie poo slides down the shoulder.
Oh and, before I forget.