Fractals

A meditation on the fleeting beauty of rain streaks across a dark windshield

Each swipe crossed the blue-black. And, with each swipe, a new portrait.

They jerked across glass like mechanical praying mantis, becoming the invasion of the night. After each jerk, there was a reverberation. It was a cringing of the rubber edge, a wincing of the aluminum interior to the bottom of the windshield.

And with each swipe, the blood-raw splatters of rain.

And with each swipe, a new thumbprint.

Each mayfly raindrop, never knowing their end was the most beautiful part, mated, gasping and brief, with the protective surface we never see until it holds more than its own.

I kept my gaze upon the origami fragments appearing and disappearing. Some splatters were big and bold like showgirls. Others were more horizontal, someone leaving but looking back while wringing their hands. Still others were small blooms of multiple flower-openings, droplets becoming smaller droplets becoming smaller droplets around the edges. The breathtaking artwork revealed for only a second, it seemed the methodical grunt and hiccup of the wipers matched the harsh and indifferent horror of the erasure. It was worse than erosion, worse than soil contamination. It was like rape; the long, stretching arms took not in bits but in one bite.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does anyone hear?

As I watched those drops burst before my eyes like fireworks, I realized how each one was a beekeeper of nature’s dogma. Each wet outline highlighted by passing street lamps was irreplaceably unique.

1,800 thunderstorms occur each day.

If one raindrop cries upon the speeding car of two women at the hour when all else rests, does its existence, its difference, matter? Does its end? Does its beginning?

How cruel, how unfair that something so remarkable would be slaughtered and buried without funeral at the fingernails of the ignorant vehicle. With each swipe, a clear vision. With each swipe, a crucified second. Time itself was forced through a centrifuge.

How cruel, how unfair that I be taught to reckon with money and mooching instead of meditating on the inconceivably vast small things.

The night was deep, but my mouth was awake. On my soft lips, breath in and out like it was connected by string to my heart valves. She was beside me, speaking, and I listened with four ears, two for her and two for the windshield show.

The car hummed as if it weren’t going at 80 miles per hour. With the wipers’ song, a soft trickle of air from the AC, and my hands clasped gently in my lap, everything seemed, at once, mellow. Dull. Easy.

Yet still.

Those splatters. If I was one in 7 billion, I was one in 7 billion. I watched.

Each swipe crossed the blue-black. And, with each swipe, a new portrait.

A last word by one condensed sphere of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, staking its claim even if to be destroyed by its own love for gravity, for doing, moving, appearing, changing, for things that happen, in the very end.