Confessions : Remembering the Rain

Remembering the Rain

The sun had fallen and sank deep somewhere west. Cold winds prowled and howled the streets, their whispers cold, like the impending rain. I was waiting for something, nothing, and then I saw her.

She was a friend of a friend, and we were barely introduced. Our eyes locked, within a blink. Within a blink, and yet I discovered that within a blink one can decipher a hundred frames. Her eyes were hidden behind glass lenses, held by a dark frame. It is all too possible the light was played with my eyes, not a vision but a mere reflection of my desires. I felt as if I knew her, was going to know, would have known her…

Suddenly she was gone. Yet within those hundred frames I remember how tried to unravel the maps in the curls of her hair, the mystery that was her, there in her eyes.

She was gone. And like all things gone in my life, I tucked those hundred frames inside some distant province of my memory.

I never knew when I would meet her again. I did not know her, and perhaps it is because of this that I longed to discover her. For some reason I knew with a certainty that she came from the same mold to whom I have always been grateful to trace. I did not know her, and even when I closed my eyes I could barely remember her face. Save for those eyes of her, and those curls that have seemed to have wrapped themselves around me, binding me.

The days and night came like fresh bread to be devoured by the ants of time.

I went on with my work, my passion, my devotion, or in some way my penance for those I have sinned against. I went on with my life, of what was left of it. I could not tell if I would see her again, only that I remember her.

Her name sounded so much like the rain. Like the rain that came on that night that swept the streets, the rain that swept things and places and answers away from me.