Summer Storm

It's raining again, summer rain that starts suddenly--that lasts for a few hours and leaves behind skies that have been rinsed clean. My rainboots have left their niche in my closet and wait by the door, taunting and daring me to leave behind my work to jump in puddles and dance in the downpour, carefree as summer should be.

I remember a night not too long ago when I ran through such puddles, freezing and soaked to my underwear and laughing at the astonished faces of passerby as they saw on my face a delight that would seem more appropriate on the face of a five-year-old chasing a butterfly. I was that five-year-old once, chasing the rainbow arc of a lone sprinkler under a scorching Arizona sun. An Indian summer, they called it. I guess that run through the rain was yet another attempt to capture some vestige of my childhood.

I traded in summers that toasted me into a lethargy for winters so cold I could thought there were icebergs floating through my veins to keep me awake. I traded in making pictures on sidewalks with rose petals stolen from neighbors, hitting random notes on a keyboard and calling it a song, building castles and kingdoms in the sand just to kick them down again for... for what?

Now I spend my days training rats to press a lever and my nights training myself to stay focused, focused on a future I'm not sure I want. I spend my weekdays in a laboratory studying how the human brain works and my weekends in a library studying how human society works, all in a vain attempt to remember how I once existed so effortlessly... so that perhaps one day, when my desk isn't piled high with articles that need to be read and receipts that need to be filed, when my kitchen sink isn't filled with dirty dishes and my laundry basket filled with dirty clothes, when the streets of this town and the avenues of my mind aren't so dark and uncertain, I'll run through the rain again, careless and carefree.

Perhaps I'll steal some rose petals along the way to illustrate my next story. And perhaps I'll kick the petals away when I'm finished like sandcastles, because this next story is about the rest of my life. And this next story is for me.

And maybe the important thing isn't what it's about, but that I ran through puddles and rain to chase it, create it, cherish it. At the end of the night, if all I have to remember it by is soaked clothes that will dry and a slight cold that will be gone by morning, I'll know that it existed, for just a brief moment in the midst of a summer storm. And maybe next time, flashes of lightning will make it easier to find my way.