Rainy Days

Write about someone you love on a rainy day.

 

Rainy days are tinted blue and pink and white and gray. Light is a watercolor and the rain washes it all over the world, down your back and through your hair and pooling the palms of your hands. (Oh, thank god for the palms of your hands.) It is the peculiar sensation that light is everywhere, because the sun is hidden behind veils of grey. There are no places brighter then others. There are no shadows. Just gray-white, floating everywhere like fairy dust. Luminescence. You breathe it in and I can see the road map of your veins, I can see your eyes get brighter.

You are laughing as you walk down the street, and your footprints are ripples that eventually fade and then the puddles are still (like you never existed). You told me how, as a child, you would go to the abandoned horse corral that haunted the ridge of a hillside. The rain would create a carpet of delicate grass with small flowers. You would walk barefoot, dancing with short lived flora, who were always open-faced and asking for the generosity of a fading winter. You told me how one year it rained so hard that the corral became a lake, a puddle one could dream that one could float in. You walked through it, up to your ankles in rain water, grass floating between your toes. You said you were glad to not be Christ, glad to sink like a stone.

But you always wear shoes in these city puddles. You say they hurt, like hard raid. You never liked being out in hard rain, the thundering rain where you couldn't open your eyes and the drops hit your back so hard they left bruises. Little red marks, passion marks, love bites from the storm god. Those rains sent you running into homes and arms and beds and you got passion marks from other gods.

It was when the sky stilled and quieted and the sun illuminated it like a manuscript and there was light in and on each water droplet and everything was pure (even you) that you went out. You would go out and you sit in this watercolor painting and I have to believe this is the most perfect watercolor portrait of a girl ever. You with your wet twisted locks, only a shade lighter then black, falling down your neck and clinging to your cheekbones, to your bruised lips. You have the dewy eyelashes of a wild animal, but in this portrait your eyes never meet mine. They cling to the bites on your fingers and wrists, on your thighs and neck.

Raindrops fall from trees like tears from the tips of fingers. I catch your tears on the tips of my fingers. I place those tears on spider webs with all the other jewels of the rainfall. They fall off, and some water clings to me. I lose your tears. You tell me, that poor spider, it's cold wet alone and now it has a hole in its home. Sorrow never fixes anything, you tell me.

You pick earthworms off the sidewalk and hold them in the palm of your hand; you thread them through your fingers like yarn. You set them free someplace safe. You are more delicate with them then you are with me, then you will let me be with you. All your bite marks are etched on your bedposts, I know they are.

We go walking through the city that night. The whole world is dipped in water, because it has no earth to sink into. It sits on the concrete and asphalt and stares at us. You go out in heels anyways, and that one black dress, the short one that flutters and falls off your shoulders. The mist on your collarbones looks like sweat, and when you shiver with wide eyes you make me wonder about drugs that can light your veins like the luminescence before rain. You walk ahead of me, all pale long legs and thin wrists, a hand bag swinging. Your steps disrupt the city's lights held by the waters. Your steps disrupt this city.

It rains on the way home, the hard rain of the storm god wanting your body. You get in a taxi and I follow, but you give the man my address. He repeats it back in an Arabian accent. I think we should be somewhere like Arabia, where it never rains, where the rain is precious. Where there has never been anyone like you, a girl defined by the curve the rain makes as it traces her face. Not this city, where it rains all the time, showing our faces where we step, where beauties like you feel mediocre and unloved.