Winter Thoughts

The rain is falling again today. Brief spells of quiet broken by a thousand drops of rain falling on the ground outside my window. Maybe it will rain again tomorrow. And the day after. Who knows? The light outside my window reminds me of something. I can't remember; the past, maybe, or the future, or something slowly taking shape in my thoughts. I am not privy to it, whatever it is. Only the rain falling outside my window offers me any comfort. And what comfort does the rain offer? Little, I think; less than a cup of water to one in the desert. Still less than fresh air to one swallowed up by the earth. Maybe it offers us the comfort of washing away the past, gently eroding the lines of our fates tangled and woven together in knots.

Just as I decide there may be some comfort to the rain, it stops, dispelling me of the notion that the earth cares about us, the way dogs care about fleas. Deep inside my shallow skull a thought stirs, stretches its limbs and returns to sleep.

How old we grow during the long, rainy seasons. How like the dead we become upon waking and again upon our descent into sleep. How tired and sullen our eyes shine out of our skulls as the grim morning meets our gaze. Each morning and night is the same struggle to live, to embrace the cold certainty of our fading dreams and shattered hopes. Each morning brings us closer to something, to death, to life, to that ineffable frontier beyond the simple acts of living and dying. With each passing day and night, the cycle of the Earth's orbital dance along the trajectory of its fate, we become hardened to the mysteries of simplicity. We grow from infants to adulthood in the flash of an eye, barely registering the passage of individual thoughts and the span of years separating one moment from the last.

Legion are those who suffer under the oppressions of their own making, finding solace in the dregs of wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays, in that silent, drunken sleep without dreams from which they emerge more exhausted, closer to the despair hanging palpably around their hearts. They can neither run nor turn to face their fears. They look to the ground for signs of dawn and tread carefully across the wreckage their lives have become only to find a wall of mythical proportions stretching out in either direction. There, they finally turn and face their fear, smiling gently and cruelly at them out of their own reflections.

The rain has stopped. It will start falling again, but for now it has stopped and the world glistens with the same possibilities it had while the sun shone down upon us before this interminable winter of our dissolution settled into our thoughts.

And this too shall pass. As the sun riseth, so does it set...