Alan Ilagan

I feel it
It’s coming…

Sixteen years ago I did not have my driver’s license. I was old enough to drive, I just hadn’t gotten around to making it officially legal, mostly because I didn’t care. Still, I loved sneaking out at night when my parents had gone to bed, putting the car in reverse, and starting it as the wheels eased out of the driveway.

That Fall was difficult for me on a number of levels. It’s not worth going into depth about it – it was simply a lonely time, and the onslaught of dreary gray weather did nothing to abate my melancholy. As a cold rain began to come down, I drove out of the small city and onto the back roads of upstate New York.

Rain – feel it on my fingertips, hear it on my windowpane,
Your love’s coming down like rain,
Wash away my sorrow, take away my pain.

The rain was tearing the leaves from the trees. Dark brown oak leaves were driven down by the wind. The car sped along the messy road. Back in my bedroom, a plastic bag, a large rubber band, and a bottle of sleeping pills awaited my return. A page of Final Exit was marked, its instructions strangely void of emotion, no guidance on what to feel.

I know it’s real, rain is what the thunder brings
For the first time I can hear my heart sing,
Call me a fool but I know I’m not
I’m gonna stand out here on the mountaintop
Until I feel your rain…

The road turned, twisting itself along a line of trees. Rain pelted the windshield, a curtain of falling leaves parted for the car, and my sweaty palms and wet eyes glazed the glass between us. On the radio they were playing an as-yet-unreleased Madonna album, Erotica. I would never get to hear it in its entirety, not if everything went according to plan. It was the one drawback to ending it that night. I could bitterly rejoice at skipping all my homework due the next day, and defiantly put off cleaning my room – add it to the mess I was leaving – but I would not be able to hear the rest of Madonna’s music, not if I left tonight.

Waiting is the hardest thing,
I tell myself if I believe in you, in the dream of you,
with all my heart and all my soul,
that by sheer force of will, I could raise you from the ground,
and without a sound you would appear, and surrender to me, to love.

It was a simple ballad with a simple chord progression and a simple resounding theme of yearning, and if Madonna was having a rough go of it then how could anyone, much less myself, be expected to do any better?
So I decided to wait, at least until the album came out and I could get a proper listen, promising myself that I could always come back to where my head was at and do it right then.

I feel it,
It’s coming,
Your love’s coming down like…
Rain.

There would be other attempts at self-annihilation, and there will always be that part of me that sometimes wishes to go away, but for that moment, that night, the simple promise of a Madonna song was enough to bring me to another day.