Wellingtonian Wastrels: After the Reel Rolled

And then it is Sunday the 23^rd and we re-awake in the late morning.  The pale blonde alarm clock having exited the house and taken the boat south several hours ago.  So we re-awake in the late morning—Robin gone—and spend the next three days celebrating Caroline’s birthday. 

The 23^rd, the 24^th, the 25^th.  These are the Halcyon days.  The golden days.  The waking life walking through the lucid dream days.

We—she and I—walking through the graveyard sprawl once again.  The parrots flitting over the gravestones.  The primary colored parrots: yellow and red and blue.  And they wheeling into the bush where we follow. 

Into the deep green and up the rise to the top of the hill.  Towering above Karori.  The southern tip of the North Island spread below in a suburban puddle of stacked houses.  Right to the water’s edge.  The Wellingtonian wash of the rolling hills.  The city built into the shallow slopes.  Right to the water’s edge.

We braced on the hill-top, side-by-side, for it is a whipping wind up here above the city and the sea.  Side-by-side and our hair wild, our clothes rippling around us, our voices muted in the rushing: as if we are underwater.  The two of us underwater and unaware of the breathing world.

We are blown down the cattle trails, through the tall grass, along the ridge line.  Blown and buoyed by the invisible currents that feel as if they will lift us up—we light-footed and springing into the sky set solid.  Swift like deer vanishing into a wood.  Vini Vidi Vichi.

This lucid dream unravelling like a ball of yarn down a flight of stairs.  Yet remembered as the ball intact.  A spinning globe on God’s little finger.  The afterglow after the reel has rolled.  And now spun into yarn and wrapped in a sphere.  The sphere spinning in a vain attempt to solidify these unravelled and unravelling days.  The days that lie ahead.  The last days of the girls’ year long adventure, and the beginning of the end of my own New Zealand trip.

A blur.

There are chocolate banana pancakes made from scratch and fresh off the skillet.  There is the smell of marijuana drifting up the spiral stairs.  There are clouds amassing over the city like an enemy army.  Advancing now toward the hills.  There is the digital glow of the television and of the laptop computers.  And the million messages from facebook friends.  “Happy B-Day, X.” 

There is the moment when Caroline complains of the clouds.  The moment when she claims that this will be her only chance at having a “hot birthday” in January.  The moment when she decrees that the clouds part on behalf of her birthday wishes.  And they do.

There is sunbathing in the backyard.  There is downtown Wellington in the afternoon.  Caroline and Eva and I chasing the sun from bar to bar to bar as it sinks slowly toward the horizon.  Brown beer in the glass and waiting for the shadow land.

There is homemade pizza in the oven and a chocolate cake that will take three days to eat.  There are movies on the television after the sun has set.  And the unbelief that anyone will ever have to go.

These are the golden days, wrapped together in the yarn ball.  Twenty-four on the 24^th.  And it feels afterward as if it really was a dream.