Will I return?
Sweet is the air. The night progresses / in time
Now is this spring’s first, and one of the very few days, that I listen to the rain. Its fragrance, moist and mossy has sentiments so fixed, annual, yet impossible to carry with me into next year, to Chicago, beyond the edge of my world.
Perhaps I will never return to this bed, beside the long-unwashed velvet mat on the bay window, against it the bronze railings, frosty, when my bare skin touches it to reach for the handle to let in the outside. The outside, the heavy air that surrounds this little globe this little world of mine.
I filled my nostrils with the chilly air, its sharp breezes, as I did two years ago, one year ago. The same smell. I will not return. Sweet is the air. The night progresses in time, As I did.
It’s his birthday today, I was there, on my phone, 12 AM, And he talked as if it was a normal day. Of course it is, I believe him. And then I threw my dying phone away and listened to the rain. Like when I leave it in the seat pocket on a plane after takeoff. It’s his birthday today. Maybe that’s why I don’t let go of the rain Today. And those feelings for him who I call soulmate. I like it now. I don’t want to go back to the spring years ago That mutual affection Only now do we know. I don’t know how I feel about the rain. When we meet again, I will tell, and he will understand.
I’ve long known that time is linear I know that so well. So I can never return to now. I will never understand Things that I don’t understand now. Because only now is still: I speak to no one on this night. No one is here on this night. Only the air, the tiny particles of rain and dust and greenery, Comes in me from outside. A pocket of stillness, A pause in time.
The blowing wind Is the only moving thing. Its falling drops of rain preserve my cocoon’s brittle frame.
I’ve long known that time passes arbitrarily, as the clock does. But there’s no clock on my bedroom walls So now passes under my say. Though it will eventually end in an hour, when sleep pulls me down and the night will go out like my ceiling light candles of old times. I know that, I know that so well.
There are four seasons in Chicago, There will be rain in the spring. But there’s no second childhood home, Or second year of seventeen.
The next morning, he texted me, saying that his grandfather passed away last night, 1 AM, and that the rain felt bleak, after first replying to the stack of old messages I sent when I didn’t mind time. He replied one-by-one, as if his grandfather’s passing could wait. I knew it could. I believe him. And because he looked up, or right, or left, or at his lock-screen, that exact hour of time.