And The Vultures Circled Closer

Besides the ticking of my broken wrist watch and the subtle tapping rain against my window, reminders of a once happy past gift and clueless mistakes long afterward: the apartment was eerily silent. As always.

I fiddled with the watch, as always I do. The hands stopped moving years, maybe forever ago. Different times, with different people: and the different feelings that accompany such concepts. Still it makes that ticking sound, insistent to continue so. As though to remind times will go on, or how times are winding down. Or simultaneously both. Amusing how perceptions of inanimate things are so easily altered by moods, actions, words. Different feelings, feelings that become unexpectedly different. As always.

It is the rain that serves me no purpose, a sound reminding or promising nothing of intimate connection. Even the amounts of water that trickle through the cracks of my open window are insignificant enough to disrupt solitude. To daydream of being caught in rain, however, does pull thoughts elsewhere. Years, or forever ago, I walked a place far from here. The smells and sense of this place is long forgotten, yet as always the feeling of there lingers vividly.

I recall traveling this place, my shoes tapping upon its road. Nighttime without any other soul wandering about. The rain had been light but was intensifying, an immediate need for shelter quickly demanded. Up ahead was a park, shrouded in imperceptible darkness aside from a lonely oak tree caught in the beams of moonlight. Now the rain was belligerent, enraged as I here happened to be within its presence. There came lightning, chilling strikes of the dangerous only light in a rapidly darkening place. Loud thunder, distressing my ears with inescapable sound. Then cackling, taunting of something inhuman swooping close in this unfortunate night. I thought to run, my legs demanded action. Of course, this lonely stranger did not know where to go.

These demonic sounds only worsened upon me: the thunder, lightning merging together with these awful creatures were closing. My worst instincts surrendered me to fear: betrayed me to regret. Sold me to the loneliness of this awful scene. The thought of this moment exactly, this darkness converging upon me, I snap myself away out from the daydream. It is unpleasant to recall unpleasant things, such as this particular thing threatens to crush more innocent spirits simply by its own recollection.

This rain, here, of this particular night is an accepted one, a fate of a future soon concluding. Clouds fade, suns will shine. Lovers will love again, as always. Shoes tap along roads and trees will give cover to our more forgiving storms. Broken hearts, like broken watches, will someday stop ticking, where sounds and demons of the rainy night will greet us again as friends or foe.