Wet walls

I hate the springtime rain.
It lacquers everything in a shivering overcoat of mind-boggling bleariness. For all the stereotypes of a joyful awakening, the rains of spring bring in the absence of everything - colour, life, rage, lust or insanity - everything is flushed away into the more-or-less clogged and equally malodorous drains.

I hate it, blazingly, with all the blackness of a long-abandoned well, with a vicious vehemence opposed to the usual brightness I welcome the warmer seasons with. As far as the palette of my feelings goes, I don't know what gray is - I never have - and to have it consistently coating all my visible world, leaking into every crack and pore and slithering round the edges of earshot is downright maddening.

I hate the springtime rain, for it drowns me in foggy and fatigued drowsiness. My veins run coarse with silent storms; a mind too damp and a body too limp to conceive them and birth them into the world are a confinement more constrictive than any creaking crate or casket. To feel the shadow of involuntary sleep looming over me in the midst of day is a nightmare of an entirely unbearable kind.

I hate the springtime rain because it drenches me in pain - a dull claw at the back of my brain, scratching along cramped muscles and a pulsating head which radiates heat. The space in my skull seems insufficient, and so the eyes water and bulge menacingly out, or otherwise contract and sting a protest against anything brighter than a desk lamp's bulb.

I hate the springtime rain because it never shuts up. Like a senile drunkard, it rambles incoherently in a self-important monotone, spewing forth a torrent of trivialities. Its hurried murmur in voices of lead and ash and heat-dried concrete is a static background noise, drowning out any attempt at a melody. It only amplifies the dreariness which so gleefully reminds me that winter is, still, right beyond the doorstep.

Glimpsing a ghost

This ritual never really took effect before 3 am.

Before 3 am, the street still struggled, spitefully, to remain awake; but at that hollow hour, the old terrace would become a wayshrine.  No statue of deity would overshadow our traverses, no marble floor would ground our footsteps.

This particular gateway is a concrete cloister, with the exposed brickwork of the southern wall giving some feeble semblance of warmth against the floor tiles whose gradient slips unevenly between tones of decomposing autumn leaves, dried out sawdust and feline vomit. It is closed off by a rather lifelessly colored set of iron bars which seem to have once been violet, now thoroughly rusted and occasionally splattered with pigeon feces. Only recently had their visits begun to thin out.

The realm beyond this unromantic borderline is one we enjoyed observing after utterly exhausting one another. With an emergency dark chocolate supply and always different background music, we'd sit leaning against opposite walls, knees touching; he'd light a cigarette and say:

"Honest to God, you're completely insane."

If people knew how crazy you really are, how many do you think would ever speak to you? If mirrors had voices, asylums would become refuges for the sane.

At 3 am the street is silent, and only the sky is allowed to speak. The deepest sort of silence is a tapestry of sounds, and in taking them away we are doomed to deafness.

(a fragment from July 2015)

A rainscape

The evening was pale. Every shred of the waning sunlight seemed to have forgotten about its kin and hung wearily in the western sky. The orange was dimmed and the reds were musky, blending with the gray tentacles of the creeping mist into a tattered shroud. This tapestry of former light enveloped the houses and settled into the street with a barely audible sigh.

The rain came down, heavy and merciless, drumming on the rooftops with all the authority of a military march; assaulting windows with a thick, lead-hued curtain of watery bullets which thundered against the shuddering glass frames like so many furious voices against an eardrum.

Out in the streets, the drowning dust of day sloshed about in desperation while a sleepy wind slithered along the lacquered concrete, mumbling into its own transparent tail. A single anaemic bulb flickered through the grumbling downpour while a steady stream of glistening torrents whispered in the yellow and brownish crowns of the trees overhead.

The houses were dark and wistful figures under a darkened, wistful sky.

(An in-class writing exercise: descriptive paragraph - weather or a location)