Rain Rain More More More On Rain Rain Rain

I know, I know. I have an obsession with memory and rain, but you'll just have to get over it. Superalo!

I have many, many good memories from the rain and it’s difficult to decide which one I should delve into first. Each memory is poking out of my neurons, begging me to describe it first, growing like weeds in the deep furrows of my brain. Maybe that’s all memory is really, weeds sprouting sporadically and randomly from the brain. Or is it the heart? It certainly is much more pleasing to think that memories stem from the heart and not the brain. I realize that that is a biological impossibility and the heart is not the center of intelligence. I just think that there’s something so vulgar and common about the brain, something too scientific, and as a rule I am suspicious and uncomfortable of anything that is scientific.

But my memories of the rain come flooding to my mind and it is hard to just pin-point one. It’s very difficult to weed out one memory and describe it here without being drawn down the path of another memory and divulging into that one as well. But I will try.

I remember about two years ago dancing wildly like an animal. I remember the mud smeared unceremoniously across my naked chest. And of course the rain, I remember the cold heavy rain, and the thunder of an unnaturally warm late November evening. I can see my friend, Jenny, and me spinning in savage, wide circles as we squeal and laugh like Maenads in the alleyway between the Chemistry lab and the theater. Jenny is soaked to the bone in her Beatles t-shirt and One-Fish-Two-Fish pajama pants. Jessica is there too, with paint all over her hands and a wide, almost drunken smile in her eyes. Sarah George is also there, her welcoming, doe eyes closed as she twisted and spun in her own world, her long wavy hair spinning like a veil around her, and looking (as usual) breath-takingly beautiful.

There’s something so ancient about Sarah. It’s like she knows some hidden mystery, but is forbidden to tell the rest of us what it is, and she is therefore condemned to merely hint at it through her piercing glances and song-like voice. I cannot describe how beautiful and unearthly Sarah looks when she dances. I can see the water beading on her skin, crystallizing its paleness. Her long, thin white arms cry out and spin as if she and she alone, were the only one who could correctly communicate with nature. Like she were the interpreter to it’s understanding, and the rest of just merely grapple for that archaic, wordless language which so speaks so fluently.

Sarah is the only girl I’ve ever met that I thought that I could truly love, as a man is supposed to love a woman. As is intended both biologically and spiritually, but like always I failed miserably in my confused and lying pursuit of her. I know I hurt her in my lying, because that’s what it was, a lie. It was a pretense that would not blind her, or God, or myself to who I really was and what my heart really needed which has only now been revealed to me.

but back the memory…

Then there is me, barefoot and bare-chested covered from head to foot in mud because I, unlike the girls, cannot resist swimming in the giant, four inch deep puddles that have formed in the ancient gravel of the alley. I’ve become animalistic and Druid-like in my excitement. I want to become the earth. I want to return to the womb from which we all came and I want to become as clean as God’s fingers. In short, I want to lose my mind, and I do so.

Ah the release! The act of losing your mind is something that is so sweet and so unexpected that it’s like caressing the cheek of the Almighty when it finally happens. It’s the purest and most holy of ecstasies. It’s the first kiss of life before age and reason stamp out and purge the foolish idealism of youth. Something that even at my minuscule eighteen, I can begin to feel creeping in on my cherished innocence.

It’s that moment that I want to hold on to forever. It’s immortality.