Summer Rain

Nothing like summer rain to make you feel the pull of earth, drenched but dry under the surface…it begs to receive it in a gentle flow. Nothing happens like you wish or know it should. I clean the bench top with a sponge and wonder whether this is me, this life I made, this me I became. I listen to the rain fall, now heavy, now steady, and know that I am not here, not beyond, but somewhere in limbo between this place and another that is or was or could have been. The rain falls heavier now, as my thoughts turn to the me within that is, or is not emerging, growing wings. I look around, things familiar are real but then not, perhaps I am sliding between  parallel beings, lives lived, not quite dropping out or within, phasing in or out, like when you are in a dream and you know it is a dream but you keep on going, keep trying to reach the goal whatever it is, whatever it is you are meant to be reaching for. This sun that streams through the kitchen window reflecting off the stone bench and the cream laminate kitchen cupboards revealing to me the dust that does not show otherwise, I reach wearily for the sponge and cloth and mechanically wipe off the dirt that has suddenly appeared all while in a trance remembering or think I do some other life that I lead somewhere, in the here and now. I glance round at the furniture, the dining suite with the embroidered tablecloth, the solid wood chairs with their cushion seats now deflated, stained with years of raising children, who have grown and mostly gone. Yet the stains remain like the memories of past events, never linear, jumbled up in thoughts, vignettes of milestones, broken relationships, heartbreak, the push and pull of emotions as each one of us grows, expands into a being we create or is created for us. 

How did it come to here? Which roads did I deviate upon, pause, retrace, regret and repress. This dream is like the others real but fabricated, I add my own plot, or think I do, rehearse some lines from someone’s half-written script, words I recall in my mother tongue or what has become it. Nevertheless, this world continues, through the front window I see the car pull up, it is him, my son now twenty-two and six foot five, when once an armful who wriggled and squirmed as I held him in one arm while stirring something in a pot, tonight’s dinner, feeling the pain and pull of motherhood that drains and saps and yet fulfills. I feel the heat now of a super-hot summer, they say global warming is happening faster than predicted, time passes ever more quickly now, a year in 365 days or more, and yet years pass more quickly, I could swear the earth is rotating faster than before. There is the image of myself at twenty-one, a young idealist, unsure of what the world is or what I can contribute if anything at all, surely someone remembers that child then full of promise, but so uncertain that with each step I stumbled, but did not fall, too scared to fall, I had to run to keep the fear at bay but failed. 

We reminisce of times past, of days spent idling as a couple, before children came and filled our days with dreams we never knew or could imagine. I sip my wine and look at the buffet opposite filled with little treasures gathered from family, friends, acquaintances, and there upon a shelf is a photograph of my father, aged but still smiling, broken but not yet shattered, but perhaps he was and the shards were disguised as beads of sweat that dripped from his forehead. Surely he knew, that dreams are fragile things easily broken unless protected, nay guarded with your life until life is no longer the dream you fashioned or imagined. In a dreamlike state I let my thoughts scatter, form shadows, shades of beings I once befriended but have since died or faded into that other realm, that life that is beside this one, or beyond it, in reach but elusive. Do I take that step and let the present dissolve into the myriad of things and places and people that co-exist but are not known to the conscious mind. I lay in bed and try to recall the dream, but each fragment becomes heavy and hurts my brain, immobile it will not move to the image I so desperately try to revive, it obstinately blocks it out and it falls into a black hole behind a screen I cannot open. It hurts to think so I fall asleep again and hope that sleep will resurrect the story I am being told by mind’s eye, heart or soul, before soul defies death and life and takes me away to another realm unseen till now. 

The rain has stopped and so has the rhythmic beat I hear in my ear, a constant warning of imminent disaster or event, they say, mother says that is what it means this so-called whistling in the ears. I wait to hear the coming of whatever it is that is being forewarned, a blasting of the heavens, a meteor dashing violently to earth at an unprecedented speed for we are human and know little of the universe, but it more likely signals a death of family or friend. Words spoken flow over me like a rain that is not wet. I hear little of what is said, this is not my preoccupation, the here, this present that I can touch in this moment. It is the sound of something else that I hear far more clearly, more urgently, that calls me to no longer ponder but jump without hesitation, or thought into this other world where I exist, or not, perhaps as a child or child’s child, birthing lives, stories that have been told, retold or untold. How rare is a human? “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Funny how certain lines and phrases of poets with a conception or misconception reach us deep within and we repeat them at each phase of life till we “grow old” and meet our demise “not with a bang but a whimper.”

I am disembodied, playing with time, whether to stay or leave, carry thoughts to that dream where I am and am not, for others exist I do not recognise in dream scenes that show these other lives. A story I should be a part of, or familiar with comes and then fades into oblivion. I reach out to touch the photo frame hoping that by touching it I confirm my existence in then and now, how fragile is this grip on life, how rare is it to remember when we did not exist and still the question of whether I exist at all. The sun heats up the earth again and I feel the heat rise within, walking through the garden green leaves tinged with brown, soil drying ever so fast as the last bit of moisture from the rain evaporates into the air and I breathe it in. Forever on the cusp of life and death the plants like us so dependent on the rain. A wave of butterflies, some large white ones others with brown spotted wings fly gently past enjoying their brief spring, a call of birds that awakens a belief in something pure, unblemished, that we cannot see. Through my subconscious I feel the pull towards a path from which I hear the call, one that no-one else can hear, and wander unwittingly towards this other life I lead.