Whattaya got? This ain’t the time to be picky. That sound, that pluviophilic sussurus you hear you is the world going ASMR on you, gently whispering into your cerebral cortex that you need to take a seat on the porch, wrap your fingers around a thick glass of smooth amber liquid, and think about it all.
You need to ask yourself the great questions, the hard questions: who am I really? Am I doing the thing I’m supposed to be doing? Is reality real or is this just a massively detailed simulation? Will A.I. take over my job? Am I pretty?
You are. You’re not just pretty, you’re fucking gorgeous.
Today, you walked by someone and they froze. Their heart lost its place in the song of their day. Their breath caught in their throat because you walked by and you carried their whole world in your wake. The fierce spirit of their heart crashed through its drum set and leaped off the stage to chase after you screaming, Hey! Hey! Wait a minute! That’s my world you got there!
But you didn’t hear them. Which is cool. It’s fine. You’re busy.
It’s hard to listen to the world. Not when you’re working with marketing to launch your new growth strategy and it’s all going to fall apart because Lewiston from Operations keeps posting ‘Fuck Canada’ on his page, which is a total joke; she’s making fun of idiots, not being one, but the social media A.I. bots don’t have a sense of humor and apparently neither do people living in rural Manitoba so you guys might delay just to have a little talk with Lewiston but what you really want to do is [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. So yeah, that heart running after you was drowned out by the madness of technocapitalism and here’s the thing:
The rain don’t care about your growth strategy.
The rain has its own agenda, which mostly involves falling. But it knows you’re there. It maps your coordinates as surely as it sheathes across the floor of your balcony, as surely as it beats through your open balcony doors, as surely as it falls onto your head, into your hair, down your face and look, you’re standing in it now and you know each other. You and the rain. A relationship as old as water. Out over the far edge of the city, the dark clouds recede like the storm-soaked backs of pachyderms, rumbling and glancing back to blow brassy, thunderous, crackling reminders of what is real. There are no likes in the rain. No followers here. It is you and it is the world itself. All that other bullshit runs off your shoulders. It pools on the fake rock floor of your terrace then falls away into the wind.
So bring the whiskey to your lips and realize you are part of a bigger thing
Those granite clouds racing away into the burbs will lose their water, their lipid corpus, into the ground. In a few hours, they won’t even exist. They’ll have fallen, soaked into the earth. Over eons they will trickle down into the labyrinthine recesses of the limestone hidden so many floors beneath your feet, then out somehow into a stream, into a creek, into barrels and into a still and then they’ll marry themselves to a grain mash and now here it is, in your hand, on your lips, a stellated star of warmth chasing down your gullet and this is what is real.
You’re not drinking whiskey, you’re drinking a storm
And this is the un-Disneyfied circle of life, the wheel of water and time, the distillate nectar which began as a droplet in a thundercloud. In your hand. Wrapped warmly around your heart now as you stand there, solid and capable, unmoved by Lewistonian havoc, a function of nature, as dark, as unstoppable, and thundersly beautiful as an afternoon rain.
Photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash
