You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 16th, 2008.
The world was blurred out the window on the ride home from work tonight. The greens and greys distorted; a once familiar landscape transformed into something so close to known, but so not quite. Like seeing the outside through tears, but safe inside where it’s warm and dry and so, so quiet. Despite the closeness of bodies and the hum of distant iPods, sometimes the metro at rush hour is eerily silent.
Everything moves more slowly in the rain. The trains, the traffic, the escalators (broken, all of them, or shut off?).
Sometimes I just need a good rainstorm. The cracks of thunder, the whipping sideways rains: they clear the slate, and when the sun comes out, it’s like starting fresh. Clean. Renewed. Forget the heat and the hailstorms, and just remember what it’s like to live. Breathe in.
The school year finishes tomorrow for all of the high schoolers back home, and I’ve graded the last of their essays till fall. The students all showed great potential, I wrote in my memos; they struggled, but they pulled through. Sometimes it was the larger meanings that swallowed them; they couldn’t take it all in, and were lost making sense of a sea of chopped waves and floating lines and words. Others of them were seduced by perceived simplicity, trotting out a one-sided analysis that, while beautifully composed, ignored the overarching and underlying What It’s Actually All About. Some of them just didn’t get it. But they all tried, I wrote; they all paddled on.
If confined to the four corners of a page, my life would receive much the same commentary, I think, from someone more seasoned at life and its intricate contours.
She tried hard, they’d say. She was on the right path, but she sometimes got distracted, and sometimes gave credence to that which was illogical, nonsensical, not really worth it. She acknowledged the larger meaning, but she didn’t quite grasp it. Too much trying and wanting, and not enough doing; telling without really showing.
And then a rainstorm, and a summer vacation. The promise of another chance.
