Daylight Savings

It’s Daylight Savings now, light later and later. My sun guilt is very firmly entrenched but I sit on one of the 80-percent-life-size couches anyway, up against the large lounge window, looking at the outside drying racks in the back yard, the chittering birds and peeling paint and golden sun of Mt. Victoria. Meant to go to yoga tonight for the first time since I hurt my leg months ago but my jaw is too sore and my lip is too puffy and now that I have event-planner extraordinaire Theresa staying with me for the next two weeks there is not a free night in my Google calendar to be found. Tomorrow I’ve got a dinner and Thursday I’ve got acupuncture and baking and Friday is another dinner and Saturday is high tea and a party and I don’t know what’s on Sunday is but I’m sure there’s something on Sunday, and Monday is the clothing swap and so on and so forth. Maybe next Wednesday I can try to get to yoga, when it will be light even later and I might only need a little jacket on my walk home.

A year in this house. A year sitting on these 80-percent couches, dipping ginger nuts into Lady Grey tea with everyone I know. Everything’s changed in so many ways but it seems incredible that I ever lived anywhere else, in this city or any other, because where I am now and what I am doing is so me. Running around to various people’s houses for various parties; making the agonizing choice about whether to get up for the Sunday market or just to sleep in; walking down Elizabeth Street Monday through Thursday at seven in the morning to cut across the ever-classy Liquor King car park to make my early bus on time, earbuds firmly in. Pasta three nights a week and silly late night gchats and texts that say “Okay on my way are you still there?” and band practice and rainy crafternoons. All the little things that make up a year, that make up a life.

It’s hard to imagine any of this stopping, moving, going away, even though I know it will. It has already, so many times in so many places, with so many people. If you’d told me when I got back, almost three years ago now, that I would be friends with the people I’m friends with today, doing the things I do today, I wouldn’t have…well, actually yes. Actually I would have believed you, probably, because I am not as stupid as I look: if you pick any any single point in your own unspooling history you can marvel for minutes at a time about all the things you didn’t know and couldn’t see and wouldn’t understand.

It’s an early night for me–I think I can manage scrambled eggs and yogurt for dinner. The sun is still up, the teacup is empty, the numbness is slowly wearing off. I’ll just sit on this couch, in this house, on this hill, on this city, for just few more minutes, just a little more time.