Get comfy my children, I’m going to tell you a story of true magic.
Once upon a time in a slightly grungy city in Australia there lived a young woman called Katie. She was a self confessed trashbag who liked a drink, loved music and had a penchant for anything that made her feel passionate. Most of the time she was a happy girl, she had a family in a sunny faraway land and another urban adopted family that both loved her. But sometimes she felt discontented with hopeless emptiness of life, mostly when she had been cooped up at home too long avoiding the world and procrastinating doing things that needed to be done. Other times Katie saw glimmers of magic.
One May night not so long ago when the sun had sunk behind the horizon early in the evening and there was the sharp chill of winter in the air, Katie felt that magic of the world. She ventured out of her cosy little wooden house filled with her favourite things and into the seedy underbelly of the city. In this part of the world there was a heaviness in the air and the streets seemed darker than they should in the glow of the buzzing nightlife woven throughout. Some people feared this part of the city, others didn’t understand it and some downright detested everything it stood for. But Katie felt more at home there every time she visited, over the years she came to even think that she belonged in this part of the world.
On this night and on this evening her trip into the shadowy part of town took her to a dimly lit bar decorated with crudely painted brick walls adorned with Persian rugs and a long silver bar with specials written behind it in white chalk, stark on black. Katie was there on a very special mission, although she didn’t know it at the time.
There was a band of eccentric musicians set to perform and their posse of family, lovers and friends had come to hear the magic bleed from their instruments. The band and their band of misfit followers had all been busy with their collectively respectable lives and had not seen each other for many months. As she affectionately greeted her friends, Katie felt enveloped into the warm arms of familiarity, as if greeting long lost loved ones.
Together they drank and talked away the hour before the band took the stage. They laughed at stories of broken hearts and failed fishing trips, congratulated those preparing to make grand public declarations of their love for each other and caught up on all the news in between. Katie revelled in the company of her friends and the marvelled at their generosity when she tasted the magic of a scotch handed to her.
As the first notes of the band’s opening song resonated down the long, narrow room, Katie felt overcome with a familiar flood of joy. She has seen the band perform countless times before, in good venues and bad, on nights when guitars were out of tune and nights when everything went perfectly, but she had never seen them play like they did that night. Their songs were injected with new energy, some having being rearranged, while other were simply staple classics. The five on stage each radiated with elation at playing their creations to an adoring crowd, dancing and jumping and cheering along with the music.
Katie was lucky, she had felt moments of magic many times in her life. But as she clumsily danced to the music and sung along with the lyrics, aware that she was probably uttering the wrong words at times, she knew she was watching magic appear right before her eyes.
As the clock struck over into the wee hours, the magic continued to linger. It shimmered in the world until the last of the Alibrandi family closed their eyes at nights’ end, then it evaporated into each of their hearts, where that magical night will live forever.
Or at least until they all come together again.
The End.
xo
So eager to taste was I that I neglected to focus the camera correctly, but you get the idea.
