Lone Lee’s Sunday Service

It’s Sunday and even though the sun is smiling through the window and gently caressing my face that rests angled upward supported by hand at chin, even though this –  still, it’s Sunday and Sunday is the day for a visit from Lone Lee.   

 

The one and only.

 

Lone Lee likes 2 o’ clockish in the arvo - as the Aussies might say - and that’s about what time it is now . Every book has been read, every surface passed over, every mote swept up, every bin emptied, every encroaching finger of shadowy dread headed off at the pass with a feather duster…

 

… but Lone Lee is an inevitable guest-in-law. And here she is.

 

She approaches me from the left and I don’t turn to greet her but I refrain from hardening my jaw or icing my gaze. It’s only my heart that quivers a bit, my guts that tremble a bit, my soul that draws a bit away from my eye windows.

 

She approaches me from the left (always, I don’t know why, she finds me gauche, perhaps, haha) on padded paws, hips swaying nonchalant from side to side… to side to side; low slung, almost silent.

 

Then, like a cat (ah, but she isn’t a cat I am sorry if I’ve led you too far now to go back) under the gripping and incongruously sensual influence of hunger, she wraps around and around my legs: wanting. 

 

A wave of longing mixed with dread and with a dash of regret flows from her into me, up my body – through thighs and pubis and spleen and colon and diaphragm and lungs and heart… up until it lodges like a hairball in my throat. I can hardly breathe.

 

I do what I must, I cough-laugh-weep a bit – it’s a trip - and collect it all in a little saucer set aside for just this purpose…

 

… and pop it on the floor. Lone Lee disappears it – I’m not sure where it goes, she has no mouth. She’s

 

soft,

 

grey,

 

nondescript.

 

I look down at her. Poor old Lone Lee, what a weird little communion. What a bizarre little shakedown this is.

 

She gets a pat, a stroke, a scratch behind where her ears might be…

 

But, she’s no cat. She’s Lone Lee. Just making her rounds, a one-woman mafia, and I’ve learned the long and sharp-clawed way that a tender welcome is best.

 

Besides, I know she wanders all the neighborhoods. It’s not personal. I’ve seen the Facebook groups, the Instagram feeds, the apps, the window signs, the TVs on at midday: the wanted ads. It’s not personal – just low hanging fruit, and even a nondescript grey fluff cloud like Lee has to eat.

 

But it does feel personal.

 

That’s her charm.

 

The clock ticking on the wall and the golden lucky cat on the window paw-waving-solar-powered by the sun, tick tick tick – these things begin to mark the time.

 

It’s funny, Lone Lee, I say… if you could speak or otherwise interact… well… we’d have to change your name, aye? I chuckle nervously. But Lee will not be drawn in… She, faceless, looks up and, formless, leans in.

 

Ah, well. I surrender. Let’s get this over with. What and who is it this time?

 

Lone Lee starts her show, starts to shapeshift.

 

She grows into the shadow of a man, is it… Chet Baker? Weird. Chet Baker playing the trumpet while somehow simultaneously wrapping one arm around my waist, hot breath at my ear – ‘give me all your anticipatory joy’. A hand in my pocket, a fist full of coins…

 

But they're not coins they’re pebbles falling through water

 

but they’re not pebbles they’re memories falling through air.

 

Catch them!

 

Don’t play these songs, Chet - it must be Baker - I’m feeling almost… blue

 

Unmoved, the trumpet player empties my pockets.

 

I don’t much care for wind instruments, actually, I mutter towards Lone Lee, pointlessly.

 

Lone Lee becomes a cloud now, or rather, a fog, lying low but moving upwards, moving in like weather – as the Irish might say - into my side and swelling, condensing - cold bleak weather flooding in, sweeping all the decorations from the walls of my insides, the photos, curios and other collected works of mediocre art bob on a rising tide. A wailing, a loss, a terrible expectation, a sinking ship…

I feel seasick. The storm beats on and the water is rising and although I know it’s just a passing Lone Lee storm, I real-fear that I may drown.

 

and then

 

it’s

 

‘over’.

 

The water retreats, it is sucked up and out of my ribcage. Out and away, turning back to Irish weather, to cloud and finally back to not-cat.

 

In my insides a ransacked space with everything, everywhere.

 

There’s a hole in my chest now, where the sky rushes in.

 

I focus on my breathing. Patch things up.

 

I think about David Bowie, standing at his piano in the early hours of the morning, waiting for his family to wake up; the morning when the song about his dying arrived at his window and he had to let it in. He said, “I didn't want to write that, I didn’t want to know…”. I wonder if it was a Sunday.

 

Now Lone Lee does what Lone Lee does

 

…  she leaves, on padded feet, as silently and unhurriedly as she came. And I pause for a moment, chin in hand, face to sun, just for a peaceful moment… then I breathe in and lower my gaze from the sky. I glide my eyes over the landscape of the kitchen counter, down the precipitous cliff face of my side and I cough, hard. The hairball flies out of my mouth and lands with a sad wet, feathery sound on the shoreline of the kitchen floor at my feet.

 

I get the dustpan and brush. It’s almost 3 o’ clock.