Your trip to the window

A flagrant bit of twilight thunder—a couple of blasts then trailing rumble, like heavy furniture being moved across the floor in the  overhead apartment. Then, coming as a concession—the rain.

You go to the window. Rain after thunder is a festival. Even from three stories up, you feel a tickle-finger of joy as you watch it splash against stucco, drops all splintery, edges, soft light.

And in the morning you catch the lingering petrichor; even the inner-city streets are scented. And, despite the crowing bleakness of an old obsession, you walk a little straighter, take in more air, and notice a dandelion where it hadn’t been before.

You order a coffee and watch a rectangular piece of sky through the window. You linger, settle in, while trying to hold on to that new dandelion.

Then your mind flits on the day ahead and like that the billboards move back in, the incessant signs, the hope-deadening mercantile ciphers. Hurry layers your once bare consciousness and you sink bleary-eyed into the slurry of what must be achieved.

Back in the sloppy-joe-burger world of information you wonder what possible bit of information you must be missing not to stay present. But you know intuitively it’s not information you’re missing, it’s just a bit of Blake’s strength.

You’re tied tight to illusion, and if not for the rain, you’d not comprehend your state. But as it is, the small turn of your head, your trip to the window, was a mercy.

In that mercy you see that the brown bag of your false self begs to be ripped from your head—to meet the world as it really is, just once, twice, maybe three times, and then, perhaps a habit.

You see a man leaving the coffee shop. He pauses to place his hand on the Lombardi poplar just beyond the door before entering the sidewalk-stream. You sense that it may be a habit with him.