Lived in Parks, Lived in the Night Air.

Tonight is Sunday night and if I could choose anything I would be sitting, legs tucked up, in a dark movie theatre watching some French film with Katie's head nustled perfectly into my neck, eating a tub of expensive vanilla icecream with a cold, clean spoon; instead I am at work, at the bookstore. Listening to Wolf Parade, rubbing my scalp, practising Mexican slang (chinga tu madre, cabron!), fielding blank questions from the wasteland minds of customers. I have a new hat - its about as good a replacement for my old favourite hat (lost in the shadows of Masada, by the Dead Sea, in Israel) as I will ever likely find, and in terms of this criteria scores an 8.5/10. There's the chilled air coming from the door. There's Oreo Wafersticks. There's dilapidated shelves, attacked by the hands of browsers (hands holding icecreams, hands holding hands), ready and waiting for me to come and tidy and straighten and replenish. My lips are chapped (the nights are long and warm and dark). I stand in the doorway, leaning onto the frame as I imagine old Turkish rug salesmen and old French Tabac owners and old African American barbers doing outside of their own stores, waiting for sales, gazing outwards at the passing by. Across the street from the bookstore is Oxford 130, a cafe which would have to be reconstructed as a set in a soundstage in the tv adaptation of my life, were there one. The chinking of glasses, the rev of engines. You know, this afternoon we were in the park and this whole group of Sudanese kids ran past flying a kite, a plastic yellow hawk on a string. It tugged and weaved between the branches of the trees. We lay there on the edge of the dappled sunlight, watching these kids, with their white teeth, and matching haircuts and fast legs skipping and tripping. I babbled about Middle Eastern history and Katie listened carefully and intently despite the serious pain in her muscles from six hours worth of dance audition. A nearby kookaburra ate the scraps of a bread roll. All around the lake there were people clustered in groups, walking dogs, cooking sausages, limbs akimbo on picnic rugs. We lay together and her eyes were wide and her hair was shimmering and her fingertips were soft and her heartbeat slow and steady and the sky was gentle and cloudless and my clothes all fit comfortably and everything was right, all right. All right?