Monday, September 21, 2009

Comfortjoyperfectmomentism

I am feeling ever-so-much better. The headache just dissolved into thin air last night, thankfully. I always get nervous when I get a headache because I never usually get them. They fill my head not only with pain, but severe anxiety about what the cause is and I worry so about all those little veins and grey things in there, hurting... But it's gone now and I am left feeling a lot better, if a little energy-less still. I am at Real Work though.

My sweet peas are flowering. Spring is really here now and it lifts my spirits way, way up. I love it. It was light when I got up. And the birds were twittering and my daisy bush is blooming and all those other storybook spring things are happening...

So, one of the gazillion DVDs I watched over the weekend had a brief spurt of Leonard Cohen's 'So long Marianne' in it. In an incredible display of time travel I was hurtled back to June, 1993. It was an icy day and I had just written my Maths 1 exam in the freezer that pretended to be an exam hall at university. Seriously, I'm sure the place could have doubled as a morgue. It was icy. That is, except in November, when we wrote our end-of-year exams, at which point the place turned into a furnace. Uniform was pretty much kikois and bikini tops and bottles of water, which we alternately sipped and poured over our heads to prevent overheating. One had to be careful not to splash on the exam page though - smudged ink and all that.

I digress. I'd finished my exam, my fingers were frozen and I left the building thinking I would pop in at my then-boyfriend's res. His res was not unlike a rabbit hutch, halfway up the hill with rooms the size of a coffin basically. He was my first boyfriend at university, and didn't last very long, but I was fascinated by him because he was dark and a bit broody and wrote beautiful poems. I knocked on his door with my freezing hands, hoping one of my fingers wouldn't fall off from frostbite, and heard him call for me to come in, which I did.

He was snuggled under his duvet, reading, and when he saw me he smiled and opened his duvet up, allowing me to snuggle my freezing body in next to him. On his record player (!) next to the bed (and I mean right next to the bed, remember these rooms were coffin-sized) Leonard Cohen's voice sang that beautiful, beautiful song and I had that feeling. I can't describe it, because I don't think there's a word for it. Comfortjoyperfectmomentism.

For a split second, as that song played in the movie, I closed my eyes, and it was vivid, I was there, I could smell his room, him, feel my cold fingers, his warmth, hear the music and I had it. A second of comfortjoyperfectmomentism. Who would've thought you could still milk the old smatterings of comfortjoyperfectmomentisms, so many years later?

Should I send comfortjoyperfectmomentism into the Oxford Dictionary?

2 comments:

allie. said...

I'm glad your moment was such undiluted joy -

I have found that these intense "back there" moments have a longinglumpinthethroatdampeyed quality too.
Something to do with the passingness of time, innocence, what might have been. .

Shiny said...

Allie - they can, indeed. This one, luckily, has just the comfortjoyperfectmomentism because it really was only perfect in very small bursts. He was lovely, but not in a long-term kind of a way and he provided many perfect moments, that were perfect, just for then. If that makes any sense? Certainly, I have many comfortjoyperfectmomentisms of the longinglumpinthethroatdampeyed version too - you've read some of them already, and there are sure to be more! x