Madame Hummingbird: 28–01–22
No Mockingbirds were harmed in the writing of this piece.
The sky above the cathedral looks sour like it’s going to snow.
For the first time in ages, I don’t identify with it.
It’s like the storm clouds I’ve harbored have been escorted out of me like a group of troublemakers.
Hope is back in town like a doorman with a Hero complex.
Just a dram, that’s all that’s needed.
Hope is more important than wine.
There.
I said it.
The times have changed after all.
It’s a regular dose of situation comedy to stare at basic human needs like it’s braille.
The reluctant finger hovering over a field of dots, not knowing where to land.
You can’t see the answer for those pesky dots.
Am I butterfly or ostrich?
Darling, you are, and will continue to be, a bit of both.
An insect/bird hybrid.
A Hummingbird?
I could live with that.
Last Tuesday I turned 44.
Makes a girl shrink.
I could feel society trying to recalibrate itself after Lockdown and it put the frighteners on me.
I was aware I was lucky to have survived my party-girl-as-wolverine days but I’d started to regret them.
Regret is one hefty bitch, the Sophie Tucker of the emotions if you will, and my two-year stint of sobriety was just a thing to be lampooned, as was my transgender approach to self-care.
I’d become a victim of my own crapture.
Guess whose been on the dysphoria/angst cocktails.
Like too many espresso martinis, it gives you a dose of the trots and a terrible hangover.
Add a soupcon of advancing age and there you have it, a right auld hooley of a crisis.
So with great trepidation, Lana and I went out for a drink last night.
To the buzziest place in this one ocean town, its streets like varicose veins in the cold night.
We hadn’t graced the joint in exactly two years, when I turned 42 and was 12 weeks sober.
It wasn’t a good look I sported that evening; cadaver-chic wouldn’t be an exaggeration.
Fiona had yet to appear as the silver lining in the mushroom cloud that had sprouted over the spot where my life had been.
I was dysregulated to Jaysus, the place a hive of activity that played out in a glaze at the corner of my eye.
Tis a lonesome thing, the penitence of the former boozehound in a bar, a very particular spin on being a human blind spot.
I felt it again as we were directed to our table, even the question of what I wanted to drink unnerved me.
I was so bamboozled I didn’t hear the waitress call me Madam.
I felt I’d been placed beneath a key light, sporting my new skin for this old ceremony, both staid and striking from my humble perspective.
I wasn’t confident in the least in this brand new role of mine but I was doing it.
I couldn’t have a brandy but a boogie would do nicely I thought.
That first foray into native territory two years earlier had produced an epic eleventh hour turnabout that rivalled any twist O. Henry could muster.
A choleric looking D.J. with agrarian scowl and all, had started spinning a few tunes and despite my initial reservations and emotional rigor mortis, I had accompanied Lana onto the dancefloor.
To promptly become the Belle of the ball, or the nearest thing akin to it.
Every dance move I’d purloined from performers I loved, galloped to the surface, my reserve falling from me like an old nail.
I danced like it was 1899.
That wasn’t going to happen tonight but that was okay.
We scanned the bar for talent and found none but that was okay too.
We still looked.
Once dinner was finished, we even sat at the bar.
I felt more comfortable in my skin and remembered my past as a barfly, just sitting there, withered and discolored, dissatisfied with my lot in life.
Martinis posed and svelte looking bottles of white wine moued in their steel coolers like ingenues in corsets and I looked at them with a knowing detachment.
No cravings here, at least that.
My spirit was having a boogie on the sly.
I didn’t feel like such a freak in this environment; different certainly, but people usually say Vive Le to such things.
Positive human contact is more important than a cataract of sauvignon Blanc as I sipped demurely at my coke, soft drinks in this context something of a bewildering novelty.
Developing my maxilla, I am, for another type of nectar altogether, one that augments my being rather than blotting it out.
I woke up this morning lighter than I’d felt in ages.
Not singing an Ave just yet, but considering vocal warm-ups.
