A weary moment.

It felt like…

All the ingredients were there, on that morning that has since passed on. Chilled air grabbing me by the bare knees, making me rattle like a cartoon skeleton. Thin gray streams of light reaching in through the thinner gaps of the curtains, highlighting dust on its way to my face. It was the type of day that I normally love. Brisk morning, fresh day. Quiet and cold.

It felt like…

Just another day as I walked my skinny frame over to the general area of the shower, and snapped open the tiny window to let the steam rush outside, a taste of hot breath for the cold world. But when I found myself looking through that tiny window, the world obfuscated by dirty slats, I saw something that I somehow hadn’t noticed before: I saw that it was raining. One of my favorite things in the world, and somehow, somehow, somehow…I hadn’t heard it spattering against the roof, hadn’t smelled it drifting across the room. I hadn’t seen it in the light. And to my own shock and dismay, I found myself thinking something that I hadn’t thought in a damn long time. “Shit. it’s raining.”
It was only an instant, really. But still.

It felt like I’d betrayed the rain.

Foolish Iscariot, denying the friend that runs tears down my face when I cannot bring myself to force out my own. It’s only a little thing, really. But it means a lot. It means a lot, considering. Considering what the rain means. To me.

I remember a time, not too long ago. I sat there in my car, finding a moment of stillness within my world of perpetual movement. It was a chance to breathe. The rain was falling. It was gentle, it was measured -- but it was falling. I listened to the sound of it breaking across my windshield as the pure love of “Grendel’s Mother,” was crying out of my crackly speakers. My ears mingled the two sensations, while all my eyes could focus on was the cold, cold rain turning to warm steam on the heat of the hood. A pure moment.

Built on raindrops, mixed with a wailing voice that spake an ultimatum in a clear, measured voice: You and I both know what you’ve done. And I will carry you home, I will carry you home; I will carry you home, in my teeth.

It scares me, a little.
It makes me wonder.

What’s it take?
Turned around, burned apart. Looking back, flayed alive. Losing it all because of a lack of trust, a moment where your weary head finally tilts down, and you find your eyes closed in a solitary flutter. Not much. But still.

It feels a bit like giving up.
But is it? Is it really?

I was thinking about this, this very night. This very morning. Elbows resting on the counter in the diner of my youth; a warm place. The kind of place that I may always come back to, where I can always find my place. “Born to Run,” on the speakers, pancakes on my fork; thought in my thoughts.

Raining on the outside.

“Yeah.”
I said it aloud. Speaking in a quiet tone, one nearly as brisk and gray as that morning not long ago. Some might call it a voice of resignation. I would call it wonder. I wonder. “Yeah.”

This is for you.
For you, my old friend, my lifesong; Amé, the maiden of the sky.
I offer you my regret. In the face of all those moments, those times where I arched my face towards the sky, those times when I took a jaunt through running streets, those times when I looked out over a stormy ocean, while icy needles jabbed me in the ear…good times. I regret my tired moment.
It’s raining, now. Right now.

I can hear it.