Rain.
Hard, sustained and heavy rain – impossible to ignore with all the accompanying wind.
Rain for which I’d unknowingly been waiting, and wanting.
Rain to still the day.
Rain to still the heart.
Rain to still the sands of time.
In an alternate time and universe, a boy religiously watches ‘Days of Our Lives’ while he stays home from school for another day. He’s not as physically ill as he pretends to be, but mentally the idea of going back to school is insurmountable, so a fortuitously-timed case of the sniffles, and a helpful body semi-ironically weakened by allergies, aid in his survival.
Like the prismatic destruction of light through a hanging chandelier crystal, distilled into smaller slivers of pretty colors, memory serves to dissect and illuminate, rendering new truths to old stories. The past isn’t always set in stone, or trapped in the snowy reception of an old television set from your youth – sometimes the past is malleable, and it moves from winter to summer…
Raspberry-shaped and raspberry-flavored hard candies dissolve amid sips of Crystal Light iced tea. Summer inside stays cool as the days of our lives tick slowly by. In the fall the boy welcomes sickness again, opening arms and heart for it to take him further away.
Did rainy days then make him feel more lonely or more frightened? How far apart were they really?
On one rainy morning on the way to school he looks up at the sky and lets the water conveniently and convincingly mingle with his burgeoning tears – that’s how much he thinks he misses home, but really he is just afraid.
Some part of him knows how unbearable the world will be.
