Shoulders straight, boardlike back, cracking my knuckles in satisfaction...
Then swiftly clasping my hands to my head and groaning that it's unfair to be hungover if I didn't drink anything...
Yesterday... I wasn't myself.
Not as in, I reacted poorly, lost control, behaved below my usual skewed standards.
In fact, I summoned up more courage than I've had to in a long time.
I just wasn't myself.
Far from human, and for once - not even monstrous.
I was a clown.
Clowns aren't human, you know. Sure, to kids, they're a magical entity, alive and breathing but not the kind who eat or sleep or ever grow tired...
But to adults?
Wow. They still see clown first, person only after I discreetly slipped off the wig after the event out back to let the sweat dry from my hair.
Maya The Clown. Adults and kids and infirm old people looked at me the same way, all of them, as if I were greater than the sum of my dilapidated yellow and white and blue and red costume and shock of perfectly red hair.
Clowns don't have egos, or doubts, or self-consciousness or the usual human difficulties. They Just Are.
And they are glorious.
I marched the fund-raiser march with Sandrine (who is very proudly "DEUX!" years old) clutching onto one hand and studiously ignoring her mom, and Suzanne, victim of a violent crime and now handicapped, squeezing the blood from the other.
It was her first time walking. She stumbled a bit and for the entire hour-long march (we took a shortcut and pretended not to notice) talked and talked and talked about her doctors and about her pills and... I didn't say much.
It seems all some people need is an occasional nod and smile and then they're grateful for you listening.
Not just her that day. But hey.
I was glad for the make-up changing my face entirely yesterday, there was an army of cameras and reporters enough to want to send me into hiding.
And of course, what's the most colourful thing to photograph? The clowns...
Valleyfield is a stunning place. "Venice en Quebec" he called it - and I could easily picture hopping into a canoe to ferry myself to work in that town.
We had fun. A lot of fun.
We went out for lunch, and I was taken aback at a lot of the things Normand had to say. Stuff about age and the child inside...
I haven't formulated it entirely yet. I wonder if he knows how young I am next to his 37 years... Or how insanely different our lives are, even after his house in the woods.
Or how cowardly some of his beliefs might seem...
I wonder what prompted him to say that I'd be young forever and that I had baby skin.
I wonder why, after I got home, I crashed at three in the afternoon and slept until four o'clock this morning.
All I did was make balloon animals (they're easier to learn on the fly than one might think) and race around in circles and waggle my purple-booted feet as if people were supposed to march that way.
But between two nights in a row of restless sleep (the first being due to simply not spending many hours in bed, and the second due to a myriad of disturbing dreams, as well as two cats who so very intently fell in love with my hair that there was no way I was going to sleep so I lay there all night watching the face of a stranger become slowly familiar with each rising gentle snore...) and the sudden test of total abandonment of every trait and quirk I've spent the past handful of years building...
SOmehow I tired myself out.
It was a short weekend, despairingly short, but devastatingly beautiful.