Only When It Rains

She only does it when it rains. Rain makes it easier. Rain provides the proper ambience. She loves the city when the sky turns a baleful, tumorous grey, when the air grows heavy and smells like slugs, when the wet streets seem slick as slime trails. Rain reinforces anonymity.

When it rains she leaves her apartment, she wanders the street until she finds the right person. She doesn't have any concrete criteria for picking the person. It might be an old woman hurrying along, clutching a tacky plastic folding rainhat over her head. It might be a prosperous businessman protecting himself with an understated Pasotti umbrella. It might be a young man...like this young man waiting for the train...bareheaded, exposed, resigned to the rain.

The actual person is unimportant; what matters is that the person is moving with a purpose. What matters is that the person is going someplace. Then she follows along. She thinks of it as shadowing, and finds the term amusing since there is no sun to make shadows.

She follows to see where they go, to see what their lives are like. It's oddly comforting to her to know there are people who have lives entirely independent of her own, people who have no notion that she exists, who wouldn't notice if she ceased to exist. There must be a reason those people occupy the world. Their lives must matter somehow; surely they don't exist just to add depth and color to her world. And if they exist for a reason, then surely she must as well.

The rain that falls on them also falls on her. They share the same disinterested rain, they walk the same inattentive street, they step in the same neutral, phlegm-colored puddles. They were linked in some diluvial way, although only she was aware of it.

But she only does it when it rains.

posted by greg @ 12:54 PM