Middle of Destiny

There is something about the rain knocking on your window in the black of night. As I peer through the glass, droplets streaming down its invisible surface, give me a sense of being in that place where life has stopped, the world is standing chastised in the corner. All cares and worry have been washed away. Each drop sliding down the glass carrying with it…?

You know that lyric, “Take the dark out of the night time and paint the day time black.” Some nights feel like that. But when you take out the dark, what’s left?

It is also that time when the quiet is rummaging in your mind for an inkling, as to where you are, who you have become, and where has the old you gone? 

It appears to be, or what you can see of it, your room. The clocks glow looks familiar, but then it is little more than a blue halo illuminating some numbers. Time appears to continue its march towards...wherever it must. 

It doesn’t matter what time it is, for that has nothing to do with the rain accosting my window. It is as if it is attempting to tell me something. I can’t imagine what. Something I don’t know, that it does? I suppose it is possible. We do receive inspiration, insight, from different people, things, happenings. 

But what could the rain have to tell me that I don’t know. I can only assume, that because it has been around, certainly more than I have, that it has picked up some interesting information over the millennium.

It is fun to think about. The ability to change forms. I wonder if that is what happens to us after…well you know, after we change forms.

One day it is a part of an ocean, an individual drop, not like every other drop, yet not the same. There are trillions, all similar but different; infinitively more, perhaps. Then, being pulled from the masses, and suspended above a changed world. Perspective is everything you know.

Looking down at where it once was, and wondering where it is going. Traveling East, West, South, the sun creating a turmoil that makes the journey tenuous, uncompromising, and then the explosions. Blasts of light, of light, racing across the sky towards…?

And then, as if being reborn, falling faster and faster, towards an unknown. The impact, surprising no doubt. Not simply an end to a journey, but the beginning of one. Turned into smaller versions of yourself by the impact, thrown back towards the violent sky you had just escaped. And then falling back to where you are a smaller, but a more learned example of your former self. Once again becoming part of the whole; surprised, hurt, angry.   

You find others like yourself being seduced by gravity, losing empathy as the numbers of travelers increase, movement being discouraged by a vegetative state of confusion. Breaking through fences, houses; toppling bridges, scouring the land, joining the assertive parade, to where? 

You begin to slow, the trees looking down with the wonder of a first visit, the emulsified earth seeking a place to rest, settle down, become once again a member of a community, being amongst those like themselves seeking safety in sameness.

Sitting quietly now, having been left behind by the mass of seekers, a small congregation, left alone. Not alone really, but no longer moving with purpose, or single mindedness. Now, staring at the sky intermittently peppered with stars.  The cause that brought you, no longer in sight, having left before the blame. 

Echoes of the war barely audible in the distance. And you wait. Wait with the others and then you realize a sudden change, the light, the sun. A warming sensation embodies you, those around you. As the sun moves across the sky, you begin to feel anxious, something is happening, and you don’t know what it is. You begin to feel weightless, and then…

You feel yourself becoming once again a spirit that longs to return to that place you remember; or do you? What was it like? Could you tell the story of how you came to be, or will you have forgotten the experience, or parts of it, all of it?

So much has changed. You have changed. You’ve learned, forgotten some, remembered some, but then, isn't this what it is all about? 

Roaming the vast expanse of unknown? Hoping to find that place where you can rest, regroup, contemplate what is to come? What is to come?

Of course, having too much time to examine your existence has its drawbacks. Too much time to review the implications of becoming something else, something you possibly had no intention of becoming. But then, so much of what occurs is happenstance. One day a drop in the ocean, another, a member of a gang heading for New Orleans, Petal Mississippi, or some random ditch on an abandoned road where only racoons any longer consider congregating, in similarities sake.

But then the opposite is possible. Opportunities to be more than you could have imagined. Singularly responsible for the intrusion of a windshield on an unsuspecting vehicle, frightening the normally serene robotic manipulation of two tons of fashioned metal, provoking a reaction that causes a tree to appear to leap from the roads edge and become entangled with diamond flecked metallic paint, attempting to convert the ridged bark of an elderly Chestnut, the last of its kind on the planet, to skepticism.

The autopsy, mysteriously resulting in a cure for cancer. You never know what a rain drop is capable of, until it renders itself unique, by breaking from the expectations of those who have condemned it to conformity.

I have no reason to believe however, that raindrops or coalitions of raindrops are not introverts, preferring to remain lost in the masses that support their anonymity, by pretending to agree with their need to remain invisible. 

I watch as this one rain drop slips down the glass. She appears more deliberate than the majority of those taking advantage of today’s climatic acrobatics.

I have named her Drucilla. Why? The name appeared in the sky, written by the jealous lightning that receives an abundance of recognition, but no sympathy or empathy. Its stark beauty sending unintentional apathetic shocks to a world it understands only too well, but whose intent is misunderstood.

I believe, it is because it is one of the elements in life that we fear, because we don’t understand its necessity, and therefore it becomes an abstraction that is easily dismissed because of its presumed arrogance. Rain drops are not like that, at least the ones I’ve come to know.

Drucilla has outdistanced the pack, and now rests triumphantly on the window ledge, slipping into the softened wood cancered by previous visitors, who first took the paint, and then began to devour its host. 

Another race has begun. Hermia is in the lead, but not for long. Two drops have apparently teamed up, and in their effort to emulate gravity on their own terms, they slide effortlessly down the glass in pursuit of the vanishing Drucilla. 

I can’t help but wonder, as the thunder erupts once again in its arrogance, and the light leaves me messages in the purple sky, if I’m not being shown the way; what to look for, how to respond.  

When it comes my turn to slip down the glass into the reflective pool beneath the ledge, and join those that have gone before, leaving hopefully, only a few streaks for those that come after me to erase.  Will I go quietly, humming softly to the beat of the tin roof, or with the brash resistance, of my Elanor. The one I’ve named, Squeegee Queen.