When exactly did I go from being the awkward girl whose eyes the "cool" people studiously avoid, cringing behind Alexe as she trundled me into my first grownup haircut (that didn't involve an elastic band and a pair of kitchen scissors) at the swankiest salon in Montreal...
the girl who hid in her chair as some far-too-collected faceless trendy spiky-haired man spoke to other customers as he rushed through my head...
...to the girl that spent three and a half hours giggling uproariously with the all-too-gay colourist at Poison Ivy yesterday, who swept away an afternoon laughing about snow and the technocratic heat shield around Toronto with the haircut girl and her Tronna accent (one of the first I've heard here, actually), who sat down facing a man who clucked and poo-ed and tsk-ed about how horrible my hair was and who half an hour later was kissing my shoulder in an affectionate gesture of adoption as his ninety-first love child.
We argued bitterly about the gay scene here, as I called the bathhouses famous, and he corrected me by describing the horrendous barebacking cliques who continue to decline to mention their infections to newcomers and yet bareback with them anyway.
We argued bitterly about cliquishness in general and he was right about that too, about Montreal and how Cox is the only bar where lesbians will deign to not look straight through gay men, how in Toronto too many women have forgotten that there's a difference between loving women, and hating men.
Even if they're gay.
We chattered about France and he broke into flawless Quebecois and we giggled as we tried to mesh our diverging accents, I learned all about Cher and some horrendously gay TV show that she thinks gay men should be furious about, we shared coy looks when this or that other patron tripped over themselves...
...and at some point, confident in the new copper threads holding up my hair, I even spoke up about that too, about how it only mattered if they were happy, not if it was ridiculous to us and how I didn't like laughing at anyone for being different.
I wasn't surprised when he put his hand back on that spot on my shoulder and stop smiling long enough to agree very seriously. With or without his twenty-six years as a buddhist (and I'm still thinking about the third koan that he handed me) he is a good man. With or without his outrageous gay-ness, he remembers the hurt he went through himself to find [his own] acceptance.
I didn't betray the awkward little girl huddled on the big leather couch underneath the clothesline filled with colourful thongs, but when the snotty wench looked down her sculpted bangs at our giggling
we both may or may not have been smug enough to laugh about her without any pangs at all.
Yesterday everyone in the little shop nurtured my ego as they affectionately ran their hands through my hair, the owner lady and the cutting girl and the colourist and the new washboy, two of the patrons and a third just asked if she could pull on a curl.
More importantly though, yesterday I grinned my biggest grins at everyone and they all grinned right back, some straight away and some a little more shyly.
Especially the little mousy girl on the leather couch who is as new here as me.
________________Returning home with a more comfortable head I was too late for the date we've been planning since sometime in June or to even drop off the dry cleaning
but we raced off and churned our stomachs at a fast food place and had plenty of time to wander up College St West, discover an italian pattisserie with almond everything and butt to first in line with Stacey and Quentin and a thespian named Jesse at a repertoire theatre showing The Princess Bride.
A very silly part of me was all too aware that the last time I saw that movie I didn't have anyone's arm to have about my shoulders.
This time, hours after we'd already gotten home, when we kissed away tears that I'd been needing to cry, a part of me squealed in glee at remembering the last line of the book:
"Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind. "
And maybe part of me is still too jaded and maybe when they overused the word "True Love" in the film even my fairytale-raised heart had a hard time not cringing, and granted my favourite line is still
"Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means"
but that kiss and all the moments in between were important.
Even the heavy sighs, but especially the smiles that came after.