Party people

A photo from a mask stall in San Cristobel De La Casas in the mountains of Mexico.

This fortnight has been one of celebrations as two of my best friends, Zak and Steph had their birthdays. For Zak's we went down to my parents holiday house and enjoyed a candlelit meal of exquisite Eggplant Masala, salmon and a ominous looking dark chocolate and raspberry wheat free birthday cake. The irony being that although it was wheat free and therefore Zak could technically eat it, he doesn't eat chocolate or large amounts of sugar after 2pm as the caffeine would keep him wired until dawn. So we sang and all munched down the rich birthday cake with zak licking the cream. The view of the Mornington Peninsula bay was exquisite a darkened ocean peppered with the fairy lights of neighbouring houses and distant cars.

Steph's birthday was the following week and her celebration was a house party and some food festivities. I had spent the day nursing what is now a full blown chest infection. Green slimy sputum that could easily be projected down the plug hole of the shower or spat into the garden on command. I graced her door at nine with almond croissants and a bunch of tulips, tulips being my favorite flower every since reading the engaging poem by Sylvia Plath when she was hospitalised with depression.

"The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons"

The party began and I chose to wear Steph's large Jim Beam t shirt converted into a mini dress. It was hilarious for a while, and then it was much too cold. The party was filling when I decided it was time that although for once it was my lungs not my liver filled with liquid I must escape home to the warmth and anonymity of bed. I was dragged on my way out to the dance floor, and true to form was coerced by the base and opulent volume to stay put for the next hour or so. I hadn't danced since I became sick, unless you count the random acts of spontaneous interpretive and highly dramatic dancing I perform nearly on a daily basis in the kitchen or my bedroom. It felt great to be at a party doing what people do at a party, interacting, laughing, forcing laughter and interaction with those who you find hard to engage or understand, dancing hard and rough and wrong to the dj's mixed bad and laughing at the antics of old friends in feathers and fish nets.

I rode home content that I had partied. That although I had forgone the magic mushrooms, LSD tabs and copious amounts of hard liquors circulating the party I had had a marvelous time.

I was still me, although I feel a lot of the time like Sylvia that I have given my body to the doctors and identity to the illness. I also have a simultaneous sensation of being exactly myself, in control and completely happy.