You Are the Rain

There is a bare patch under the tree in the front yard from where we neglected to pick up the fall leaves after Aria broke her arm in the shape of a triangle. Slow, reluctant seedlings sprout from the dense, packed Earth and it is, I think, so painfully beautiful and hopeful and peaceful.

I spoke with you the other day and I left our conversation feeling empty. There is so much to say these days and so little to say of import. It is easy to talk about the running of our respective homes and the details of the adult decisions we are now exclusively responsible for and so difficult to talk about the things we have spent years lying to ourselves about, burying under the unfulfilled desires and disappointments of growing older. I wish I could say that I feel hollow and empty and so desperately lonely right now and I wish you could remind me of the truths of the universe, of our connectedness, and of the normalcy of these emotions. I wish we could be precisely the people we dreamed of when we were eighteen. But there is no dress rehearsal. A point you and I have both begrudged for many, many years. This is our one go at this life and we are, frankly, winging even the important decisions. Perhaps most dreadfully, we are fearfully evading the biggest lies and painting them with a shiny gloss in the hopes that the facade will, impossibly, last.

If you were here, you would probably comment on the bunnies and the lightning streaked sky and the smell of fresh rain on cement and the way the wind blows in a particular way just before the drops fall. It always blows into the storm, right, when it's going to be most severe? And there is often a pause just before the brunt of the energy hits, as if the storm itself is taking one big, deep sigh before the inevitable release? You taught me to watch the clouds and the wind and the storms when I was just a child and I have never stopped to wonder if your statements made as a matter of fact had any actual validity or if they were just a way to paint a veneer of magic over my eyes.

I worry about the disappointments of life and how we will recover. I have always been a stalwart believer in resilience and inevitability, as though the pains done to one over the course of a life time were lessons and leverage toward growth. As the years move inevitably forward, I worry about the consequences of having been wrong. What if pain and sorrow exist in and of themselves and we move on, we recover, but never fully intact? 

You are in such a desperately hard moment of your life and if there is a silent prayer said before I close my eyes at night, it is that you will recover and you will laugh and the world will hold many tiny, beautiful things again. It is that, somehow, there will be some blessing in all the difficulty, and we will smile again on a beach somewhere with some over priced beer and the anticipation of too much cheese and white bread and cookies that need decorating or a new cake recipe that needs to be tried.

The air here is tricky. So painfully, painfully dry moment to moment. But after a rain, it's as though the moisture floats and fills the desperate senses to bursting with moisture and cool and a connectedness to the natural world that is otherwise so very, very difficult to capture.

When I was younger, I think I used to fight the distance between us. I would think that we would both journey for a time and then, inevitably, find one another again. I thought geography was temporary. And, it turns out, I was entirely right; the geography that was so precious and invaluable to the person I have become was absolutely temporary. And driving away from you before the most monumental changes in our lives has proven that I can live in your absence and that life marches on without you.

But I miss fireside chats. And decorating Christmas cookies with names. And hazelnut nectar. And the way being around you made everything hilarious. And the way that you could read precisely what I needed with one look or one word or one tear. And it's so good that you are out there and living and doing all the things we dreamed of doing when we were younger. But I would give so, so much for a borrowed moment of time with you. For a quiet night and a boston creme pie, and drinking too much wine and talking about Kundera and listening to the ocean waves and knowing that you have always, always, always, always got my back. 

I miss you. I love you. So much that the veneer of adulthood fractures entirely and I am able to say, with no sense of regret or hesitation, that you have always made everything so much more beautiful and hopeful and peaceful. And though watching the rain without you is a thing I still do, it can never be done without reverberations of the way the world felt when it was you and me and me and you.