slow sunday morning xvii
Trips for four, five days. Enough to get just a taste, enough to leave me wanting more. What a sweet escape: a place new to me, home to someone else. The smell of foreign shampoo lingers on your pillowcase, and in my hair. We wander through costume stores wearing each other’s coats, as if the costumes we're wearing already aren’t enough. I’d paint a portrait of you while we sit on the bus if my pencil was oil, if the inspiration would travel down from my head into my fingertips.
Travel in the colder months, of which there are many where my friends can be found, feels distinctly cheekier; summer is the time for vacations, what do I think I’m doing galavanting around in the slush and snow? Trying your version of crappy, get-it-done coffee, letting you pick the songs that will travel between my earbud and yours?
I've made this house, uh... room, a home.
These are the scenarios that bounce in my head on afternoons like these, the slow ones. Everywhere I was before I found myself here, and everywhere that I must remind myself I’m working towards being now. 3:35, gnawing at the last bits of an apple with laser focus, like this task bears any level of importance compared to the ten on my to-do list. Don’t taunt me, pencil markings of the night before last. I’ll scratch you out in the evening for your sins of attention-seeking magnitude. Don’t laugh at my sore legs from dancing instead of working the weekend away, like the human I am. I’m at the desk now, and that has to count for something!
Fall is creeping back in again, slowly. The mornings are chilly, they fool you and make you peel off the layers you stacked on top as soon as noon hits. I sit in my studio as if a change of scenery will will any more productivity than already exists in the drought left from the summer. Lamps are strewn around in an attempt to stay away from the fluorescent overheads, and I stole one of the two comfortable office chairs. The kinds that have awful 70s patterns and one defective wheel, but man, are they better than the plastic chairs for sitting and looking busy. This, a summary of the images clouding my mind, is my last gift to myself before I submit to the woes of site analysis. Of mapping, housing prices, amenities.
For this moment, back to cozier, more enticing memories. If only for a second. They let me off early, and I caught you in between the medieval armour and the mid-century modern chairs. Plastic chairs I find much more enticing than the ones I’m avoiding in the studio. There’s this museum game I love to play with absolutely everyone I find myself wandering with. I invented it with my brother, and as with many things that originated from bored afternoons in his company, it’s a non-negotiable part of my museum experience. Here’s how it goes:
- We stand in front of any given display of many little things. Figurines, ceramics, swords, snuff bottles in the case of the AGO.
- We look long and hard. We treat this decision with excessive importance. Then, if you couldn’t guess already, we decide on a favourite. We don’t dare tell the other.
- One after the other, we try to guess each other’s favourite. Sometimes its on the first go, sometimes the last. It can get quite heated, that frustration if we’re on round ten of bouncing around twenty similarly glazed vases.
With you, and the knowledge that we had a reservation at a hidden Hong Kong bistro some 40 minutes from then, we skipped over many favourite-able displays in favour of seeing as much as possible together. I had already missed my personal favourites while I was still in the office, namely the crystal room and that wall of jarred specimens of unknown origins, but I sure as hell wouldn’t miss the rest for the world.
I had it so easy in the summer, but then again, I think I had everything so easy when I’m looking at it after the fact. Even the spring feels dreamy to me now, when I know for a fact I spent it slaving away in a computer lab, up to my neck in drafts, sleeping at five in the morning and doing it all over again for weeks on end. I’ll revisit this period, of co-opting the shared studio as my personal office where negligible amounts of work get done, as heaven later no matter how it feels right now.
Addendum: Final gift to myself before truly working is finding a kettle that will allow me to make coffee for my evening ahead. Through the neighbouring studios I go.