A Clover’s Luck - by **-=NaT=-** - Prelude
Prelude
The city was getting ready for the night. It was a chilly Sunday night, leading to a holiday Monday. Montrealers were eager to profit from the last long weekend of the summer. Maybe that is why northern cities nowadays have a late summer long weekend. It is so that people can say their last goodbye to a summer that was barely there.
He was setting up his rig. Not much time left for the set up, but he has done it so many times that it no longer mattered. He would always arrive thirty minutes late anyhow, be ready in three minutes sharp and not get any complaints. The pubs were glad; at least he always made it, unlike the average musician. Being averagely reliable in the rest of the world made out a heck of a reliable musician.
He was giving away the impression of a captivating, fun, self-assured individual, but everyone has some skeletons piled up in the closet. Sometimes, those dark passengers of life can even overtake the wheel.
But geez, he was good! He could feel the audience, captivate their attention and give them a fun evening. Never the time of their life, always a fun evening. The sad realization that one day hits any artistic mind, the incontrollable fear, is that they have never been able, not once in their life, to give so much as one person the time of their life by playing… Just by playing. But they keep hope. They keep hope, because hope is all they need.
He started strong, bar filling up with acoustic sounds of a Martin D-28 and his strong voice. There was no doubt he was gifted. He was warming up, and it felt like the city was warming up as well.
Sometimes he would think that there is nothing better than the feeling that fills you when the crowd is applauding you. Whether they cheer for your master skills, your voice, charismatic character or the brand of your delay pedal does not really matter, since you will probably never know. Especially if you never look into it. What matters to an artist is to have an audience, an adoring audience. And he or she is rarely worried about the price to pay for it. In any case, people seldom properly link cause and effect. So that night, like every other night, he was giving a show and wondering whether or not he is giving anyone the time of their life.
The pub was getting full right about midnight, when Allyson walked in. She took her black jacket off and sat in the corner. The light was dim, perfect for a crime of passion. She didn’t want to be noticed, but she wanted a drink really bad. Perhaps she wanted to feel the courage of a lion, perhaps she wanted to forget everything in the world, perhaps she wanted to just feel numb, dumb and sad for herself. All that and more can be achieved by a few strong drinks. She got her double shot of vodka much faster than the three guys on the opposite side of the bar. If there was any advantages to being a woman in the modern world - that was one of them. She left the empty glass at the bar, and ordered another. The warmth has filled her body, her mind contracted into the size of a chick pea and her muscles simultaneously relaxed. She would normally be at home right now, but she could no longer take it. She needed to know the reality, and, although she was scared of what she might discover out there - there was no turning back.
She thought about it long and hard. Trust must be at play. She felt like half a being for far too long. It was just too much to take. She felt like she knew him, she felt like she could trust him, but something rational, something deeply human and calculating was pushing her to check out for herself. She felt guilty and ashamed to be one of those women, who rarely trust anyone, yet she could not bring herself to believe that there was any bad will at play.
Sometimes when you are deeply hurt and damaged when you are growing up, you never recover. Should a child ask for love, or does he or she deserve love simply by the fact that they are child? Is there justice in this world, or is each person the creator of his or her own justice? Is there any way to recover from the pain one has had to endure, or is it a curse that follows one around for life? The questions of the sort have been bottling up in her head for as long as she could remember. There was a never ending supply of them and so many unanswered, that sometimes she would feel helpless, weeping like a child. Music was one of the only escapes in her life. Human beings are so good at escaping…
Music filled the room. There were many songs she knew, the voice caressing the ears, the music touched the chords of the soul. She tried to remember why they even were together. She tried to reconstruct the past.
=
It was late autumn. The trees have already bared themselves, but there was still not a sign of snow. She turned her Ipod on and Infected Mushrooms rang in her ears. She was standing there, trying to understand how she got where she is, in a relationship of doom and incompatibility. Once again.
“Oh, yeah, because of good intentions and solitude”, Allyson remembered, “what a dangerous mix…”
Solitude has followed her whole life, up until now. Rarely, it would give way to the feeling of belonging. Mostly, it was solitude all around. She thought hard about it, growing up. “Does solitude follow loyalty? Are they inseparable halves of one?”
When she was a kid, she had a best friend, Katia, whom provided that feeling of togetherness and belonging. They spent all the free time together, playing, sharing, and getting in trouble. Through the child prism, she never saw the end coming. Leaving to the grandparents for the summer, Allyson always knew that Katia will be there when she gets back. Until one day, a big orange envelop came through the mail. It is then that her dad and mom sat her and her brother down and told them that Canada has accepted their immigration request.
Perhaps it was then, that Allyson realized that nothing and no one is forever. Allyson and Katia wrote each other for a couple of years, but it seemed like interests have grown apart quite quickly. After all, when you are a child, it is important you share the same sandbox, if you want to remain friends. The teen years are the worst time to lose your friends. Friends from your childhood, tend to be the ones who help keeping the ship straight when you enter High School. Without them, you become a free-floating object, hitting obstacles on the path of trying to find a friendly shore. Except, it happens that by the time you arrive at the shore, you can no longer tell how friendly it really is. Allyson tried to find a friend like Katia everywhere she went, but good friends are hard to find. By then, solitude was queen of her soul. And it was to remain so, until she found love.
=
Her train of thought got interrupted. The couple of buddies sitting on the table next to her in the pub had just shared an intense moment. Their laughter had eclipsed the music and her thoughts. Sometimes, just like that, a train of thought is lost and will not return for a while. She found memories about her childhood and teen years painful to remember. She was glad they were over. Perhaps, when you feel your mind is escaping a certain subject, it should be a sign that that subject is not to be ignored. But on the other hand, dwelling over past suffering is a vicious circle. Way before the train hits the next station, you already feel sick, like if it had been running in circles instead of a straight line.
But this time the interruption was a good thing, it helped reset the mind. She started to remember that the story had begun well before last autumn. The story always begins before we decide to begin the story. It was true that he approached her last autumn, but she had noticed him way before then. In fact, he impacted her life before he even knew he did. It seems his dream of giving someone the time of their life was not without foundation after all.