ecappaccino's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 325 - si peu soucieuse I sit next to the best looking person on the bus. Forgetting the price rise in fares, I had tried ruthlessly to pry a nonexistent extra twenty five cents from the lining of my (shockingly pink, shockingly Asian) shoulder bag - another offering from China a few years ago from my aunt. I have many aunts but only one bothers to send me things via members of my family traveling over once every third of a decade or so. I have only ever met one aunt. Meanwhile, family history hadn't solved my loose change situation. In the end I had bought a CD and warm cinnamon apple pie, trying to get cash out of an EFTPOS machine. Unluckily I had no idea neither of the places I went to offered cash out so I ended up with an odd assortment of items - the CD, the pie (stuffed into my shoulder bag on the bus), and a paper bag sealed with masking tape, labeled Fast And Loose in blocked vivid handwriting over another strip of masking tape containing - who knows what? as Gaayathri had pointed out. What could possibly be in a [creased] brown paper bag folded like a lunch bag, taped and scribbled on in vivid? Suspenders. Grey suspenders. But nobody else knew. I laughed and said that Gaayathri should hold the mysterious and slightly sordid looking bag to go with her adventurous new haircut (A no. 3 shave which seems to be growing out at an amazing rate). I had met her in town on a collision course towards each other along K' Rd, between Symonds Street and Queen Street. The bus is filled with evening sun. It's warm - there's the pie on the other side of my bag, held against my stomach. I am filled with lost hours of sleep, a lurching locomotive sensation, and the mechanical grunt of the gears beneath the floor. It hums like planes roaring beyond fiberglass windows at the airport. The bus is silent. The good looking person beside me - who I have only seen in profile - taps on the ledge. My eyes fall shut. I open them three bus stops later. They fall shut again. It frightens me, the sensation of my brain shutting off. I feel like uncontrollable things happen while I in that comatose state. It is not ordinary sleep. It is too deep. I thought to at least enjoy the charity of the bus driver a little more - I had given up on change and miraculously discovered a bus card. The bus driver had let me pay for two stages (zones) when in fact I told him I was traveling three. This morning at home, turning the doorknob, I discovered that both my wrists were injured while trying to cream butter and icing sugar together yesterday afternoon for shortbread. I can barely twist either - they are mobile, but feel swollen and stiff, as if they had been recently broken and had been left to set too long. The skin on the back of my hand seems tighter too. Less elastic. I bend my right wrist again and again just to check. It could be worse. Everybody promises me it will get better. It's half past midnight. The study smells like the combination of many perfume sample cards Gaayathri and I had collected from the Smith and Caughey's in town. The pile consists of both men's and women's fragrance. Like strange gathering of invisible people. The party has already taken over half the house by diffusion. I am sitting here half undressed, and in a few minutes I will be back in that frightening unconscious with the lights out in my bed. The inside of my head will be pitch black. Right now, however, I am back at Esquires cafe with Gaayathri. It is the afternoon again. She stirs her smoothie one straw at a time while I stare at the cream on top of my iced chocolate, wondering how to steal it all up in my mouth without making a scene. I never used to buy iced chocolate, I end up thinking to myself. No doubt inspired by a passing guilt about dietary splurging. Having failed the cream, I dip my straw in and pull it out to lick chocolate syrup off the sides. I'm not sure if I said it out loud, because Gaayathri chooses to ask me right after that thought, "Why do you have iced chocolate?" Habit, I tell her. And then I elaborate. It amused me, just a little. 12:41 am - 01-17-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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