Hailstorm
Stir crazy behind the computer until an all-campus notification describes incoming thunderstorms, severe with hail. I tell my officemate. I tell another coworker. I tell the barber during a late lunch, and another man turns on the weather channel that displays the warning in a red advisory box. I am elated, and then a hoped for encounter before the workday ends.
Leaving the stairwell with a coworker, she expresses her terror at the prospect of severe thunderstorms. Glowing, I tell her that I love them, and she muses that she is aging. I go to the local coffee stand and purchase dinner: a low-fat blueberry muffin and a plain croissant. The barista takes my mug and ganders something different than the usual. An iced coffee with coconut and cream-my first chilled beverage of the season.
I find a bench at the fountain in the sunlight, listening to the stray flecks of water glimmer on the red bricks. A group of kids on the opposite side of the fountain are boasting about fucking girls. They laugh and grow silent, one swaggers toward me and swoops back to his friends with a slack smile. I'm an obvious subject of speculation, savoring my coffee and watching the leaves lift skyward in cantor with the breeze, warmed by the sunlight pinking through swaths of promising darkness. Somewhere in the rhapsodic sky and the lilting of the fountain an hour passes, marked by six chimes. The boys begin to smoke and the clouds yield only sunlight.
I return to the office. At sunset I visit the river and circle back toward the fountain, legs outstretched on a monument row bench. I hope for rain that doesn't come, watching the heat lightning until the clock sounds three additional times. A townie shouts at me, and I wonder whether he is so dissentient as to love thunderstorms.
Leaving the stairwell with a coworker, she expresses her terror at the prospect of severe thunderstorms. Glowing, I tell her that I love them, and she muses that she is aging. I go to the local coffee stand and purchase dinner: a low-fat blueberry muffin and a plain croissant. The barista takes my mug and ganders something different than the usual. An iced coffee with coconut and cream-my first chilled beverage of the season.
I find a bench at the fountain in the sunlight, listening to the stray flecks of water glimmer on the red bricks. A group of kids on the opposite side of the fountain are boasting about fucking girls. They laugh and grow silent, one swaggers toward me and swoops back to his friends with a slack smile. I'm an obvious subject of speculation, savoring my coffee and watching the leaves lift skyward in cantor with the breeze, warmed by the sunlight pinking through swaths of promising darkness. Somewhere in the rhapsodic sky and the lilting of the fountain an hour passes, marked by six chimes. The boys begin to smoke and the clouds yield only sunlight.
I return to the office. At sunset I visit the river and circle back toward the fountain, legs outstretched on a monument row bench. I hope for rain that doesn't come, watching the heat lightning until the clock sounds three additional times. A townie shouts at me, and I wonder whether he is so dissentient as to love thunderstorms.