here i stand and face the rain
I stare out the window, my head turned to blind my glossy eyes from the future ahead and the present beside me. I’m afraid to look anywhere else, turning instead towards the life behind the panel of glass so marbled by the familiar tide washing towards the shore of my cheeks. All of the colors run together and shapes become distorted; the solid powder of sky and the leafy green trees seem to be filtering through the sandy wall, pouring through so many holes where the bricks were misshapen and didn’t seem to fit right with the rest of the wall already so conformed to unity. I clutch the water bottle in my lap tightly, needing something to hold onto when I found your hand so far out of reach. We stop at a red light and the man on the motorcycle next to me watches the tears stream from my eyes and fall into my lap like he wishes he could catch them and save them to give back to me one day when I fall backwards into memory and have an ocean to drown in.
With streaks of tears dried onto my face in stickiness, we arrive at the building and I walk ahead of him through the doors and up to the counter. I give her my paperwork and sign in as I bite my lip and she steals glances at my sickly face and wet eyes. With careful words, as if choosing the wrong ones could tip me into recession, she informs me that I forgot something I wasn’t aware of. The words come slowly to me, edging along the brink of sanity, because they know they were the wrong ones. I can feel the tears running towards my eyes as the thin red lines cracking through them become bolder. I turn around, unable to look him in the eye, and whisper the wrong words in a shaky voice. The look he gave me, of sheer disgust, the drop of his shoulders, held for a thousand years upon my frail mentality, broke me. My teeth sunk hard into my lip as I pushed open the door and went back to sit behind the panel of glass caging me from life.
The words come flying; only wrong words want to soar the skies today. Wrong words with wrong numbers, a calculation of how much gas I am costing him, oh those precious quarters that could be used to buy back the minutes of life that I am stealing from him. The words and the numbers flit about the cage, starving for fresh air while caught in the midst of this thunderstorm, almost suffocating from my silence. He puts his hand on my leg and takes my chin to try and force me to look at him. It remains staring out the window through blurred eyes as he tries to find the right words for the first time today. They are lost.
“Well are you better now?”
“I’m fine.”
“Why were you upset?”
“I don’t know, I just cry. I don’t know why.”
Lie.
---
You said next time it rains, you’d make it worthwhile.
And if everyone else’s heaven is as blue as your eyes, but my skies have charred into lifeless ash, would you still look into my charcoal clouds streaked with salty rain, and make it worthwhile?