The Teacup

I can no longer tell the difference between tranquility and exhaustion. Today I played an Amaj7 chord in front of my instructor, quit the rest of my guitar lessons, skipped my hockey game, and spent a baffled hour staring at a partially healed laceration on the swollen foreleg of a placid, brown horse. Now I’m sitting on the sofa with a teacup encircled in little blue, stamped birds in curious poses. Superstar bought me this teacup on a whim, and Saturday Flyboy asked my mother directly who would take care of my bird if I moved overseas. The idea that my friends and lovers feed my little blue bird fetish enthralls me. It’s literally the only topic I can concentrate on with any clarity today.

I was holding my own last weekend until Sunday, as weekends usually go. Superstar was out for my tournament and we zipped up to the city for some Thai and a chance encounter with a tiny blues band across the street. Saturday was polo and my pony, Texas, was a star as she always is with sports that involve a white ball and running around and being a bully. The entire cheering section in the far viewing stand was mine, and we won our game with an animated battle through all four chukkers. Superstar took me for dessert at the bakery, and then he spent the rest of the afternoon haggling for oil paintings and leather wrapped mirrors at a new gallery downtown, debating the general merits of having pricey furnishings shipped to one’s high rise apartment in Chicago. I don’t know anything about that, right? I just play polo. It only took one sangria in Palo Alto before I was lamenting the day like a spoiled pet, whining woefully about Switzerland, lost love, and the overflowing garbage can on my patio, all while clutching my new blue birdy teacup in both hands as Superstar drove my car and my muddled self home.

It all came back to bash me over the head on Sunday, when Superstar left for business in Germany at seven in the morning and I was left to drive down to Gilroy on a sweltering afternoon and dress a huge trailering wound on Texas’ left foreleg. Even after the outlet shopping expedition, I never really recovered. I spent the whole Monday one step behind everyone else, a measure behind my guitar instructor and not even in time enough with office project discussions to contribute at the very least, my standard dissent. I drove back from Gilroy holding my eyelids open with my fingertips, knowing my feeble veterinary knowledge was nothing compared to a possible staph infection, freaked by the swelling in my pony’s leg and saddened by how easily I had quit a year of guitar lessons.

I didn’t mean to quit my guitar lessons outright. I’ve been taking lessons for about one and a half years now, and I’ve gone from an unteachable to one of those mediocrities whose friends who all tried to play but never followed through think is great. At least I can take my guitar with me. It’s my most accessible hobby, besides bookworming. I am not sure, on the other hand, what to do with Texas, both with her leg and with her as a horse whose only vocation has been to chase a ball around on a field and knock other horses out of the way. How would she take to being a trail horse, or a jumper, or a pasture ornament? She loves routine, as we all do, until we decide that for some reason, routine isn’t for us and that the enigmatic dream of the unknown would suit us better.

Except that, it really doesn’t. It makes one give up guitar, and miss hockey, and spoils small victories with excessive bleeding. And yet, I’m terribly drawn to it, the way Jujy is bewitched by caves made from stacks of couch pillows into which she peers with an outstretched neck. Going into the unknown is undoubtedly, even to a small blue bird who loves her daily routine, more exciting than the view from her hanging cage in the middle of a living room in Mountain View, California.

I’m exhausted. Or I’m tranquil. I’m not sure which. I want to quit everything and perch with my hands around my blue birdy teacup on the edge of tomorrow, peering into it, imagining everything that could be on the other side of the darkness.