Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind – Entry III

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Some storms don’t soak the skin. They reach inside and drown the marrow.

Tonight the rain falls with the weight of a kept promise. It doesn’t descend so much as push down, insist on itself, fill the air until breathing becomes an act of resistance. The umbrella in my hand is a thin, trembling continent; its black fabric funnels water into dark rivers that spill from the ribs and rope to the ground, drawing vertical lines that feel like tally marks. Somewhere I’m being counted.

The street has shrugged off its people. Windows glow, then look away. Streetlights smear halos on the mist like saints who regret their own patience. My coat is heavy enough to qualify as armor but still lets the cold in—through the seams, through that spot between the shoulder blades where water always finds a shortcut. The storm carries the smells I grew up trusting: iron, pavement, the faint algae note of gutters choked with last year’s leaves. Petrichor is what it’s called when rain wakes dust. This isn’t that. This is the breath of basements, of clocks that stopped and never got restarted.

Most people say storms cleanse. They don’t. Storms etch. They score the world and leave grooves for the next one to follow. Memory works the same way. Once a path is cut, the water takes it again and again, deepening it until it becomes a canyon, and you call it fate.

I tell myself I walk for the exercise, for the chill that makes coffee taste better when I get back. The sidewalk knows the truth. Each step lands with a small slap like a hand refusing to be held, and every slap says a name I don’t let my mouth say. I keep the umbrella low. Its edge makes a moving curtain; beyond it the world is a stage I decline to enter.

The rain speaks in small questions, a whisper pressed to the cartilage of my ear. Why carry ghosts in your pockets? Whose absence is shaped so perfectly you keep mistaking it for a lung? How long can you pretend the storm is a sky problem and not an internal climate?

I don’t answer. Some questions aren’t interrogations; they’re companionship. They walk beside you until you forget whose footsteps are whose.

Water beads on my knuckles, then threads down my wrist, finds the cuff, and hides there. My fingers have gone bone-white at the tips; the skin looks borrowed from an antique photograph. I switch the umbrella from one hand to the other, and the frame shivers, a metal insect deciding to live. At the end of the block, a bus sighs at a stop devoid of bodies, doors wheezing open and shut as if practicing a conversation it will never have.

I turn toward the river because storms like edges, and I like to know where mine are. The path down to the water is a sheet of black glass scratched with gravel. Headlights pass behind me; their light arrives a breath late, as if slogging through syrup. I don’t look back. Looking back is a hobby that requires drier weather.

At the railing, the river is all sound—slap and suck, slap and suck—the old mouth of the city learning, forgetting, relearning the same word. I lean the umbrella to the wind, and the rain repositions itself like a cat denied a lap. It finds my cheek. It salts my mouth with a taste like pennies. The umbrella is darker at the seams, as if it has a memory of other storms and the memory is leaking through.

When I was small, thunder meant counting. Lightning was the beginning of a math problem: one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, the exact distance between flash and sound giving the gloom a measurable spine. The grown-ups said the counting made it less scary. They were wrong. It made it precise. Fear wears a suit better than it wears a costume.

The river throws back a warped copy of the sky and, inside that copy, a copy of me: a shadow under a shadow, face freckled with rain that refuses to choose a direction. The umbrella’s edge drips like ink. If I stared long enough, I’m sure the drips would form letters, and if I read them, they would say the exact sentence I’ve been dodging since the hospital room went quiet. I look away.

A figure moves under a distant awning—just a darker shape tucked against a wall—but the storm has trained my nerves to salute things that might become stories. It’s nothing: a stack of plastic chairs shrink-wrapped for the season, the blue sheen of water making their edges animate. I laugh once at myself, and even the sound is wet.

I walk on, because the body hates stasis more than it hates weather. The umbrella tugs at my shoulder with the low, dull impatience of a dog that knows the route better than you do. The wind changes, and I tilt to keep the edge against it; the whole world follows the same choreography, heads bending in the same direction, rain showing us how obedient we can be. Somewhere a shutter slams, the beat so regular it could be a heart or a metronome or the conversation of two neighbors who never liked each other and never will.

The storm consults its ledger and turns a page.

I remember a kitchen on a morning that wasn’t raining. A mug warm in both hands. The door opened a crack because someone kept promising they were only stepping out for a second, and the air didn’t believe them. I remember the way your umbrella leaned by that door: a black spine, a curved handle, nothing special until it was. I remember how an object becomes a relic without changing its weight.

Thunder rolls itself across the city like a drunk trying to find the couch. I count u—no. I stop. I let it arrive when it arrives. The rain thickens as if consistency can be argued into existence. A seam gives way; a bead becomes a string becomes a thread that refuses to break. Water starts a new river down the inside of my sleeve. I could be angry about it. I let it have me. There are defeats that feel like permission.

Halfway back from the river, a dog materializes from the blur. Yellow eyes, coat the color of soaked cardboard, not close enough to touch or call a breed. It considers the umbrella with the careful contempt of a creature that prefers honest weather. For a second, I think it will fall beside me, become a sentence in this night that makes the ending feel earned. It snorts rain out of its nose and vanishes between parked cars, a ghost that refuses the job.

There’s a scent here I can’t place at first, sweet and wrong. Then the wind angles and the bakery on Third breathes out its late-night hymn: sugar, yeast, something caramelizing into morning. The storm catches it and ruins it to perfection, the way a good sadness ruins a good song. My stomach remembers hunger. My mouth doesn’t.

I pass the pharmacy where the lights never sleep and the aisles are organized into the many ways a human can try to manage a body. A cardboard cutout smiles behind glass, offering discounts to the version of me who believes relief comes with a barcode. I keep moving because the storm makes shoppers into fish, mouths opening and closing on hooks they can’t see.

By the time I reach the long, unclaimed wall that smells like damp chalk, the umbrella has become less a shelter than a prop. The fabric sags. The ribs press through like bones, attempting to confess. The handle is slick between my fingers; each step tightens my grip until I think of all the things I held like this that weren’t designed to be held so hard. Another seam lets go. The drip from the edge becomes a fringe.

I stop. The storm doesn’t.

There’s a moment in every walk where the umbrella becomes the negotiation instead of the weather. Do I keep the pretense? Do I bow to pure utility? Do I admit I was never trying not to get wet—I was trying to look like a person who knows how to behave when the sky loses composure?

I close the umbrella.

The world arrives all at once. Rain tattoos my scalp. It pounds my coat into submission. My breath goes winter in my throat. Without the fabric’s invented horizon, the street expands; space stratifies into layers of falling, and I stand inside the waterfall the city pretends to be. The cold is immediate and honest. For a second, I’m a bell that’s just been struck.

It’s louder without the umbrella’s drum-skin. The storm’s voice loses its mutter and speaks plainly. You are not special, it says, which is not cruel. You are not being punished, which is not comforting. You are weather, which might be both.

I tilt my face up. Raindrops hit the soft parts first: eyelids, lips, the tender seam where nose meets cheek. Each one is a document signed by pressure. They run into my mouth and turn language into an optional feature. I swallow some. I let the rest choose their exit routes.

When I open my eyes, a reflection waits in the blank glass of the office building across the street. It’s me, of course, reduced to two tones and the blur of falling lines. But in the pane beside mine, there’s another me, half a step out of sync, hair pasted against a forehead I don’t admit to, mouth a different shape. We stand together, both of us soaking, both of us looking like a problem that finally stopped pretending it had a solution. When I lift a hand, she doesn’t. We agree to ignore the difference.

The rain thins, not because the storm has decided to be kind but because it has done what it came to do. The grooves are deeper now. The next pass will find them without effort. Water slackens from torrent to conversation. Far away, a siren remembers it is a note and ends like one. I open the umbrella again, not because I need it but because carrying it closed feels like an argument I didn’t mean to win.

I cut back toward home through the block nobody chooses unless they live on it. The shutters have found their rhythm. The bus has given up. The bakery exhales one last sweet breath before morning takes the shift. My shoes report their failures. My coat, relieved of drowning, becomes merely heavy. I am etched, but upright.

At the corner, a streetlight clicks off mid-sentence, and the dark it leaves behind is not empty; it is honest. I stand in it for a count of ten, the way I used to stand behind the door for hide-and-seek, pretending the game wasn’t rigged by the size of the room. When I step out, the light wakes as if I’d taken something from it and it had questions. I don’t answer. I give it my back and my rain and the slow swing of the umbrella’s weight.

Storms end. They always do. The air will be washed, and new people will step into it and call it clean because they weren’t there to feel the drowning. But the grooves remain. Bone remembers. Roads keep secrets in their cracks. The next sky will know where to pour.

By the time my key finds the lock, the rain is a fine whispering. I hang the umbrella by the door, a black spine cured of ambition. It drips politely onto the tray that exists to forgive it. Inside, the room reeks of heat and old paper, and the first thing that comes to mind is dry. I strip the coat, peel off the sleeves that turned river, and stand listening to the last of the storm speaking to the window. It’s only water, it says. It’s only weather. And yet.

I breathe. The breath goes all the way down. It finds the places the rain found and settles there like a treaty.

In the morning, no one will believe the sky ever weighed this much. That’s fine. The street will carry the record for me. The umbrella will remember. My bones have been engraved with tonight’s handwriting, and the next time the ceiling opens, I’ll step outside already fluent.

Author’s Note:
Third splinter. Storms don’t absolve; they annotate. If you walk long enough, you learn to read the margins.