Rain on Me

It's cloudy and overcast and rainy outside and I wish so much that I could put on Billie Holiday and curl up on the floor by a window just like a cat and read and doze and drink coffee or maybe eat a bonbon and watch the sky get so dark with rain that I need a lamp to read by. Everybody has parts about themselves that they share with everyone, everybody has that one story they tell a hundred times becuase it defines who they are, everybody has one tired attribute. For me it is this love of a gloomy day. It has become such an intrinsic recognizeable part of me that friends and family in all parts of the country will inform me when it is gloomy their way and say they thought of me.

I can remember so many perfect gloomy days. The edges of those memories are so crisp like the outline of a tree branch on dark sky. Someone once asked me about the best day of my life and despite all my other options, like the day I first arrived in Rome, or got accepted to grad school, or kissed a boy, or whatever, I chose the rainy day in ninth grade when I listened to Semisonic on repeat and read Anne of Green Gables underneath a big warm comforter and the rain kep falling and from downstairs the sounds and smells of a big family dinner in preparation floated up to me. And when I emerged from my sanctuary of rainy reading, the house was bright and warm and became Home, with a capital H, like true home.

Or there was that Friday morning my senior year of college when I got up early and sat on the fifth floor of the student union in an empty cafeteria drinking coffee and staring out the window at the leaves just begining to turn red and orange in backdrop of raindrops. I remember really wanting to remember that moment. I remember knowing it was important, that it could bring me an unstoppable joy even in fifty years.