Dream. Raindrops play out Taiko rhythms against your taut-skin, drum-skin. Meticulous, but not gentle. Is it masochism, the way you crave this heavy rain? Shut your eyes, seal them up tight. Sparks course along the lines of your body and shimmer just beyond the edges of your flesh. Taste the lightning, hidden in that millimeter gap behind your front teeth that you can barely reach with the tip of your tongue. Droplets hammer like fists against your porcelain bones, and you count every impact until the rain falls faster still. Smile, lips pressed together, as the downpour’s weight tries to force you to your knees. Stand, knees canted wide and low, like Atlas holding up the globe of the sky on shoulders broad as the crest of a throne. Even when the balls of your feet sink deep into the gravel and the muscles in your calves and thighs smolder with the pain of exertion, you’re too proud to cry out.
Stand gargoyle-still as the vertical tide meets your unbowed head. Hair clings to the canvas of your scalp and forearms in Jackson Pollock whorls. Let the water drip down from your fingers and chin and the beak of your nose, heavy enough to melt the sidewalk dirt back into mud. The air is rich and soft like summer moss. Beneath it all, the deluge still digs its fingernails deep into your skin. Contentment cascades down your vertebrae. The pleasure you feel in the throes of the storm is not the sudden flush of desire, not that electric obsession with skin on skin that sinks your stomach deep down into your hips and lights reckless fires in the old-growth forests of your mind. Lust always paints the rims of your ears vermillion, makes your own flesh betray you in its urgency. But the thrill of the tempest is pure as meltwater.
One humid summer years ago, you stepped into a walk-in freezer to escape the heat. The door hissed shut against its grimy rubber seals. You sat down in the piles of ice shavings and produce labels until your body heat thawed the floor clean. This dream is colder and clearer than that icy reverie. After all, there’s nothing industrial about the rain. Strive to remember its flavor, its scent, when you awake. Drink in the petrichor until it permeates your alveoli, a dark sweet musk like every street is lined with evergreens rooted deep in loam. Look between the city boulevards, out towards the mountain valleys filled with fog. The earth is fresh as your father’s garden, full of green seeds nestled deep. The sky kisses the tips of your fingers. You see clearly, just this once.
Undream.
Sunrise oozes up along the capillaries of the eastern sky. Drag yourself up, stare out the window at the friendless light. Empty heat scuds through the morning in place of clouds. The air is waxy with disuse. Turn the covers over, over again, writhe out wormlike onto the floor. Sit up into a V, count the muscles in your core as they strain with disuse. Push your fingers against the floor. Feel the sterile smoothness of laminate wood. Find your feet. Drag along the edge of the room into the bathroom. Fuck. The mirror shows you eyes that used to be striking in their blueness. Now they wonder back at you, half-lidded, uncertain whether waking up was the right decision after all. Shake your head, hoping the bleariness will slosh to the edges and drain like pus from the corners of your eyes. It doesn’t.
Cold shower, cold shave, but your skin gets no smoother and your brain gets no clearer. When you gnaw at your bottom lip you still taste the dryness of salt. Squeeze into your clothes in a hurry, hide from your own nakedness. Button the halves of your shirt together and hope that all the seams will hold. Stretch your spine, your jaw, try to find the point where your chin spills over into your neck. Doesn’t matter. She’ll be here. Soon? Use your fingers as a comb, leave your bangs tousled, let a few stray hairs catch the sunlight. In your bedroom, the light won’t turn on. Unscrew the bulb, listen to the jangle of a broken filament. You’re out of spares, so you screw it back in. It makes no difference. This isn’t your home.
You’ve forgotten something. Haven’t you? Worry presses against the edges of your skull like you peeled out and left a stray thought lying bloody, its legs broken, on the side of the highway. Your mind’s too small, anyways. You’ll always forget something. Just move now and remember later. No work today. More time to dwell on, then. Her. She. Again. Here of all places. Step into your shoes and ignore the laces. Out the door. Concrete stairwell, concrete alley, drab town that opens onto withered hills. It’s still winter, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing here. Sweat beads on your forehead and pools in the small of your back. Your hair turns back into grease under the palm of your hand.
Your pockets are too light. Phone. Back inside. You can’t tell which is rustier, key or lock. Pour yourself a glass of ice water with one hand, fumble for your phone with the other. You can’t let yourself glance at it so you focus on the water instead. Gulp it down in one long pull. The cold blazes down your throat and into your stomach, cleaner than this dry California dirt. Fiddle with the focus knob of your mind and your thoughts stop blurring for a moment. She’s coming here, to see you. She reminds you of home, of distant rain. Maybe her touch can help keep things this clear. You’ll know soon. Only a few hours more.
Outside again. Between the cars and the buildings it all slips back into conundrum. The only thing to soothe you out here is your own frustration. The sky touches your shoulders but it has no weight. The trees pretend to be green, but when you run your thumb along their serrated leaves you know that these are desert plants. You miss the parchment-skinned birches, the pines muttering among themselves in the wind, the forsythias with their flowers the color of the sweet lemon-sugar glaze your brother always used to put on his blueberry muffins. You run your fingers through the earth, let it flake between them back onto the pavement. You might as well gather up these lifeless fistfuls of soil and pour them all into an urn on the mantelpiece. Because what’s the difference between ash and dust anyways? Nothing really, except that ash used to be something alive, but the dust was never anything but dust.
You answer your phone on the first ring. You hope she can’t hear the bulge in your throat as you swallow. Her voice is coarse with static and something else, but it’s hers all the same. Pedestrians wander by you as you listen, wearing their half-faced smiles. She says only a little – a greeting, a question. Everything out of her mouth is a firework. Answer, before you miss your chance. You try to inject your voice with gravity, but it cracks when it finally passes the parched scrubland of your lips. Why do you always sound like you’re asking permission for something, no matter what you say? Can she hear it? Does she care? You can barely hear her over the sirocco of your worries. You agree to meet her in mumbles and nods. She says she loves you, with the sweetness of a blown kiss, and then she’s gone.
Half an hour to wait. Drum, drum your fingers against a parked taxi, paint stripped by the barren air. Rust flakes off under your nails. Love? She’s been saying that for two years now, the two years since she’s heard your voice or seen your face. Maybe she means it. When you answered in kind you certainly did. Her kind words had always been enough to make you blush, enough in fact to make you fall in love. She hasn’t changed. But you spent two years in this reclaimed desert, mummifying. You left your soul bottled up on narrow shelves for too long, and now it’s all gone to vinegar. It’s best taken one sip at a time. She can remind you what the rain feels like, give you back the misty coasts in a single kiss. Already too long in one place, waiting. Light a cigarette, trace her initials in the air with smoke. One long drag. Feel your lungs shudder as they try not to close in on themselves. Then snuff out the ember against the brick and mortar of a corner bodega. You never needed to smoke when the air was alive in the first place.
The faint wind, tender as her touch, precedes her. The only life in this town is concrete and neon, even in daylight. Music thrums from underground. What if she doesn’t show? You’ll find the nearest bar, scorch your throat with something strong and cheap, write her name in pencil on the cocktail napkins again and again and again and again until it loses its meaning. Watch the men on the dance floor. Eyes front, limbs flexed, teeth bared. Wolves padding circles of pawprints into the tundra, circling their prey. Maybe you’ll pick a fight, drag one of them outside. You did that once. Even your blood somehow tasted gray. Or you’ll light another cigarette and smoke this one down to the filter.
You’re already fumbling with your lighter when you feel her hand squeeze your arm. Her breath has the cotton-candy cloy of dime-store chewing gum. Turn to face her, remind yourself of who she is. Place her back into your reality. Trace the contours of her body with your gaze, just for a second before you stop yourself and raise your head to meet her eyes. Imagine that she sees the same flaws your mirror always shows you. But she quirks a smile instead, a real one. You tell yourself it’s real. Close your eyes, feel the northeast rain of her presence fill the dead blue sky. Toffee sentiment hazes up your mind. You wonder when you’ll be ready to leave her alone. Will she outgrow you? Why is she here? Love? Apparently.
She wonders aloud where you’ll go. Anywhere but here. All the way back to the Atlantic coast if you can. Wishful. Some fresh air is the next best thing. So you hail a ride. Up into the hills towards higher ground. Maybe dead brown grass is better than dead gray streets. Step out onto the bristling chaparral. Rough plants scrape at the soles of your worn-out sneakers. Knurled trees trace out orreries on the hilltops, places where druids might have gathered back when we believed in magic. Even the shadows are desiccated. You turn to her, back from the landscape. Somehow she pulls a picnic spread from a basket you hadn’t noticed before. You talk for minutes that fall apart into hours, sharing all your memories. You’ve grown old. She hasn’t. She leans closer, moment by moment. You’re too busy dreaming of rain to notice.
Night falls purple, in one subtle motion of the sky. The valleys fill up with fog, stifling the light of distant towns into smudged gray halos. But even the moisture here is tongueless, numbing. You move together into the dark, and the air stands still. No clouds above. Look up, see nothing more than scattered dots of light. After all, your eyes were not designed to see the stars. Then she pulls your head back down, pulls you into her, a sudden kiss. Experimental. She has a comet’s scent, a comet’s taste. You blush, from attraction, from shame. Return her kiss. Tentative. Like a new lover. This is what you want. This is what you want. It’s still too hot, too dry. You need a smoke. Knead your forehead, close your eyes, try to bring a flood down from the bare sky. Is this what you want?
Pull away, away, like the ebb tide. She sees the storm in your eyes. Now she knows. Less than a foot between you and already your skin cools down. Let yourself sigh. When you walkPull away, away, like the ebb tide. She sees the storm in your eyes. Now she knows. Less than a foot between you and already your skin cools down. Let yourself sigh. When you walk even further, the hills exhale with you. You hadn’t realized they could breathe at all, this far out west. But you still sense that emptiness above you, clawing at your skin, your tongue, your thoughts. Say goodbye to her. Undream, for the last time. And fly home, down the hills, back to the rain.
Stand gargoyle-still as the vertical tide meets your unbowed head. Hair clings to the canvas of your scalp and forearms in Jackson Pollock whorls. Let the water drip down from your fingers and chin and the beak of your nose, heavy enough to melt the sidewalk dirt back into mud. The air is rich and soft like summer moss. Beneath it all, the deluge still digs its fingernails deep into your skin. Contentment cascades down your vertebrae. The pleasure you feel in the throes of the storm is not the sudden flush of desire, not that electric obsession with skin on skin that sinks your stomach deep down into your hips and lights reckless fires in the old-growth forests of your mind. Lust always paints the rims of your ears vermillion, makes your own flesh betray you in its urgency. But the thrill of the tempest is pure as meltwater.
One humid summer years ago, you stepped into a walk-in freezer to escape the heat. The door hissed shut against its grimy rubber seals. You sat down in the piles of ice shavings and produce labels until your body heat thawed the floor clean. This dream is colder and clearer than that icy reverie. After all, there’s nothing industrial about the rain. Strive to remember its flavor, its scent, when you awake. Drink in the petrichor until it permeates your alveoli, a dark sweet musk like every street is lined with evergreens rooted deep in loam. Look between the city boulevards, out towards the mountain valleys filled with fog. The earth is fresh as your father’s garden, full of green seeds nestled deep. The sky kisses the tips of your fingers. You see clearly, just this once.
Undream.
Sunrise oozes up along the capillaries of the eastern sky. Drag yourself up, stare out the window at the friendless light. Empty heat scuds through the morning in place of clouds. The air is waxy with disuse. Turn the covers over, over again, writhe out wormlike onto the floor. Sit up into a V, count the muscles in your core as they strain with disuse. Push your fingers against the floor. Feel the sterile smoothness of laminate wood. Find your feet. Drag along the edge of the room into the bathroom. Fuck. The mirror shows you eyes that used to be striking in their blueness. Now they wonder back at you, half-lidded, uncertain whether waking up was the right decision after all. Shake your head, hoping the bleariness will slosh to the edges and drain like pus from the corners of your eyes. It doesn’t.
Cold shower, cold shave, but your skin gets no smoother and your brain gets no clearer. When you gnaw at your bottom lip you still taste the dryness of salt. Squeeze into your clothes in a hurry, hide from your own nakedness. Button the halves of your shirt together and hope that all the seams will hold. Stretch your spine, your jaw, try to find the point where your chin spills over into your neck. Doesn’t matter. She’ll be here. Soon? Use your fingers as a comb, leave your bangs tousled, let a few stray hairs catch the sunlight. In your bedroom, the light won’t turn on. Unscrew the bulb, listen to the jangle of a broken filament. You’re out of spares, so you screw it back in. It makes no difference. This isn’t your home.
You’ve forgotten something. Haven’t you? Worry presses against the edges of your skull like you peeled out and left a stray thought lying bloody, its legs broken, on the side of the highway. Your mind’s too small, anyways. You’ll always forget something. Just move now and remember later. No work today. More time to dwell on, then. Her. She. Again. Here of all places. Step into your shoes and ignore the laces. Out the door. Concrete stairwell, concrete alley, drab town that opens onto withered hills. It’s still winter, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing here. Sweat beads on your forehead and pools in the small of your back. Your hair turns back into grease under the palm of your hand.
Your pockets are too light. Phone. Back inside. You can’t tell which is rustier, key or lock. Pour yourself a glass of ice water with one hand, fumble for your phone with the other. You can’t let yourself glance at it so you focus on the water instead. Gulp it down in one long pull. The cold blazes down your throat and into your stomach, cleaner than this dry California dirt. Fiddle with the focus knob of your mind and your thoughts stop blurring for a moment. She’s coming here, to see you. She reminds you of home, of distant rain. Maybe her touch can help keep things this clear. You’ll know soon. Only a few hours more.
Outside again. Between the cars and the buildings it all slips back into conundrum. The only thing to soothe you out here is your own frustration. The sky touches your shoulders but it has no weight. The trees pretend to be green, but when you run your thumb along their serrated leaves you know that these are desert plants. You miss the parchment-skinned birches, the pines muttering among themselves in the wind, the forsythias with their flowers the color of the sweet lemon-sugar glaze your brother always used to put on his blueberry muffins. You run your fingers through the earth, let it flake between them back onto the pavement. You might as well gather up these lifeless fistfuls of soil and pour them all into an urn on the mantelpiece. Because what’s the difference between ash and dust anyways? Nothing really, except that ash used to be something alive, but the dust was never anything but dust.
You answer your phone on the first ring. You hope she can’t hear the bulge in your throat as you swallow. Her voice is coarse with static and something else, but it’s hers all the same. Pedestrians wander by you as you listen, wearing their half-faced smiles. She says only a little – a greeting, a question. Everything out of her mouth is a firework. Answer, before you miss your chance. You try to inject your voice with gravity, but it cracks when it finally passes the parched scrubland of your lips. Why do you always sound like you’re asking permission for something, no matter what you say? Can she hear it? Does she care? You can barely hear her over the sirocco of your worries. You agree to meet her in mumbles and nods. She says she loves you, with the sweetness of a blown kiss, and then she’s gone.
Half an hour to wait. Drum, drum your fingers against a parked taxi, paint stripped by the barren air. Rust flakes off under your nails. Love? She’s been saying that for two years now, the two years since she’s heard your voice or seen your face. Maybe she means it. When you answered in kind you certainly did. Her kind words had always been enough to make you blush, enough in fact to make you fall in love. She hasn’t changed. But you spent two years in this reclaimed desert, mummifying. You left your soul bottled up on narrow shelves for too long, and now it’s all gone to vinegar. It’s best taken one sip at a time. She can remind you what the rain feels like, give you back the misty coasts in a single kiss. Already too long in one place, waiting. Light a cigarette, trace her initials in the air with smoke. One long drag. Feel your lungs shudder as they try not to close in on themselves. Then snuff out the ember against the brick and mortar of a corner bodega. You never needed to smoke when the air was alive in the first place.
The faint wind, tender as her touch, precedes her. The only life in this town is concrete and neon, even in daylight. Music thrums from underground. What if she doesn’t show? You’ll find the nearest bar, scorch your throat with something strong and cheap, write her name in pencil on the cocktail napkins again and again and again and again until it loses its meaning. Watch the men on the dance floor. Eyes front, limbs flexed, teeth bared. Wolves padding circles of pawprints into the tundra, circling their prey. Maybe you’ll pick a fight, drag one of them outside. You did that once. Even your blood somehow tasted gray. Or you’ll light another cigarette and smoke this one down to the filter.
You’re already fumbling with your lighter when you feel her hand squeeze your arm. Her breath has the cotton-candy cloy of dime-store chewing gum. Turn to face her, remind yourself of who she is. Place her back into your reality. Trace the contours of her body with your gaze, just for a second before you stop yourself and raise your head to meet her eyes. Imagine that she sees the same flaws your mirror always shows you. But she quirks a smile instead, a real one. You tell yourself it’s real. Close your eyes, feel the northeast rain of her presence fill the dead blue sky. Toffee sentiment hazes up your mind. You wonder when you’ll be ready to leave her alone. Will she outgrow you? Why is she here? Love? Apparently.
She wonders aloud where you’ll go. Anywhere but here. All the way back to the Atlantic coast if you can. Wishful. Some fresh air is the next best thing. So you hail a ride. Up into the hills towards higher ground. Maybe dead brown grass is better than dead gray streets. Step out onto the bristling chaparral. Rough plants scrape at the soles of your worn-out sneakers. Knurled trees trace out orreries on the hilltops, places where druids might have gathered back when we believed in magic. Even the shadows are desiccated. You turn to her, back from the landscape. Somehow she pulls a picnic spread from a basket you hadn’t noticed before. You talk for minutes that fall apart into hours, sharing all your memories. You’ve grown old. She hasn’t. She leans closer, moment by moment. You’re too busy dreaming of rain to notice.
Night falls purple, in one subtle motion of the sky. The valleys fill up with fog, stifling the light of distant towns into smudged gray halos. But even the moisture here is tongueless, numbing. You move together into the dark, and the air stands still. No clouds above. Look up, see nothing more than scattered dots of light. After all, your eyes were not designed to see the stars. Then she pulls your head back down, pulls you into her, a sudden kiss. Experimental. She has a comet’s scent, a comet’s taste. You blush, from attraction, from shame. Return her kiss. Tentative. Like a new lover. This is what you want. This is what you want. It’s still too hot, too dry. You need a smoke. Knead your forehead, close your eyes, try to bring a flood down from the bare sky. Is this what you want?
Pull away, away, like the ebb tide. She sees the storm in your eyes. Now she knows. Less than a foot between you and already your skin cools down. Let yourself sigh. When you walkPull away, away, like the ebb tide. She sees the storm in your eyes. Now she knows. Less than a foot between you and already your skin cools down. Let yourself sigh. When you walk even further, the hills exhale with you. You hadn’t realized they could breathe at all, this far out west. But you still sense that emptiness above you, clawing at your skin, your tongue, your thoughts. Say goodbye to her. Undream, for the last time. And fly home, down the hills, back to the rain.
CONNECT WITH CAMERON:
Cameron Matthias Campbell is not a student now, but he was until recently, and will be again. He is a storyteller, a historian, a science hobbyist but not a scientist, an amateur adventurer, a hiker, a skald, a writer with a young man's smile and an old man's eyes. After graduating from Stanford, he returned home to New England, where the air has taste and texture, and will remain there drinking up the land's vitality until some new venture calls him far afield. To quote Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, "He is older than he once was, and younger than he'll be – that's not unusual." He exists on Twitter as @CameronMatthias, and on the web at cameronmatthiascampbell.wordpress.com.
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