The Luxury I Live In

It’s a vaguely unsatisfying day, filling me with melancholy and longing. I can’t explain why on this early summer day – the sort of day that lets you know that summer is truly coming, blissfully warm with not a cloud in the sky, but just a little too much wind and not quite hot enough for traditional summer activities like swimming in the ocean. I spread out Bella’s blanket on the lawn and took my book and put on my purple-lensed sunglasses to read in the sun and get some colour on my alabaster legs which have turned strangely shapely and muscular from the belly dancing and aikido and soccer. They clash with the lumpiness of the rest of my body. The lawn felt too big for one small girl, I was a dot amongst the long grass rippling in the wind. Bella stalked her way through it, the grass is long enough for her to surprise me emerging from it like a tiger from the jungle. She pounced with purrs and love, no teeth or claws in sight, and she basked in the sun alongside me, but I still felt incomplete. The ducklings swam two by two on the lake, so proud to be out so far without their mother, and I felt a pang which I refused to call loneliness. I never was a girl who depended on the company of others, I am a girl of self-sufficiency, I rely on myself and enjoy my own company. There has been not enough time for me to enjoy it lately. Friday at the poolhall with the malleable crowd, people wending in and out of the group, sectioning off into smaller groups or pairs for more intense conversation, the whole thing like some magnificent large scale dance which everyone instinctively knows. I spent the night chatting not with my usual tight-knit group, but with girls I’d never met or only met briefly before, and I felt enriched. A girl called Sina and I became inseperable as avid spectators, commenting with faux knowledge about people’s tactics and shots. Ree’s girlfriend hit on me, playing me songs on the jukebox and hyperbolically complimenting my pool skills. but I forgave her for she is a flighty 19 year old. Then on Saturday morning, breakfast with the tight-knit group at our local cafe, sitting outside in the sun on the edge of the market, the town buzzing around us as our conversation flew and sparked. So much laughter, recounting the night before, Ree and her girlfriend reconciled, Mare ordering half the menu, Jax giving me most of her breakfast because I was so hungry and she was too hungover. We ventured out into the market afterwards, but I didn’t notice it for I was engrossed in trying to re-assemble Ree’s girlfriend’s puzzle-ring. After far too long I managed it and looked up just in time to spot Athena coming towards us. A small conversation, for she ventured into the market just to gather fruit and vege and she was retreating home to nurse her flu. We all got ice cream, Mare asked for a kiddy-sized cone and was presented with a marble sized scoop on a miniature cone, I learned that lemon sorbet does not compliment cappucino ice cream. As evening fell, some of us packed up into the country for a barbeque, taking too much food with us. Mare’s mother, a farmer, had recently slaughtered a cow and Mare brought about half of it for the 5 non-vegetarians to eat. I brought tofu sausages (which everyone howled with laughter at) and big, flat field mushrooms stuffed with garlic and coriander and butter (which everyone wolfed down). We lit a brazier and sat around it gossipping into the night. After so much shared laughter, so much shared food, so much shared conversation it is perhaps unsurprising for me to wake up feeling alone here amongst my too-big lawn with the ducklings, and Bella and the low-hanging blossoming tree, the petals of which get trapped in my thick web of hair every time I walk through my own front door. But equally it is why I savour it, knowing that I have friends just over the hill ready at all times with beer and food and laughter, just as my tree-house and my lake and my lawn and my cat are ready to accept me with loving arms and let me dream or create or sing or sleep. Such luxury I live in.