...My Maroon Futon. NY, NY.

The rain is slapping patches on the window. It all brings me back.

To water colors. Grade school. Afternoons where my hands ran slipshod across paper, rampant and stupid and somehow, impossibly, uncaring whether they reach something great or just make a mess.

Somewhere in life we start cleaning up after ourselves.

There comes a time when it's not alright anymore to just see where the road takes us... too many dead ends or something, right? I miss the days when we walked the halls, our muddied, paint dripping hands against our slowly dirtying clothes, nonplussed by the whole affair. Or maybe enjoying it... small validation of existence that they are... our little stains.

What happens to these marks along the way? Detergent. Brooms and mops and vacuums... we live in a society that grows out of its roots, or rather is pulled, weed-like, from the fertile earth of adolescence... into the world of expectations. The world of consequences and no more second chances.

I can see it now, the two of us standing next to the lake... the rain is just beginning... the mosquitoes fleeing the scene, making room for the lightning to come... we look at each other and without words have the conversation we'd had all week... about Summers and worlds apart and consequences and the sweetness of subtle mistakes... about nothing really but in the moonlight it seems like everything just then.

I see myself running through the rain... down Lexington in the midst of a brutally sudden downpour. The sky, shades of violet and peach, with a sliver of green... the drops, wet gobs... tiny bursts with each impact. Several times I look behind me to see if a stranger has cared to follow my momentary footprints in the water, but they fall flat and rejoin the pool before others can enjoy their sanctuary. Warm though, the mid-September rain.

I hear the crack of thunder and I can almost feel the power go out of the house... like one big whip extinguishing the light from a candle. It shakes the place... the walls shudder at the tremendous force of it all and the stillness that follows rings like a church bell in my chest. We begin to think of things to do... my mind always devising adventures... maybe there's a body to be found somewhere in some quarry! Perhaps a book that's been left unread all these years will finally get its due. Or maybe, and this is the most likely of all scenarios, I'll see how long the electric devices in the house can operate on batteries... and then reach for my guitar.

This nearly April rain has the kiss of spring in her heart. She is that flicker warm, like the first moments of a bonfire or the sunrise. She promises that soon the rest will follow. Soon there will be grass, and trees filled with new life, parents chasing children into the cavernous depths of our most sublime Central Park. She says, in a voice that is a whisper in my ear during a rousing chorus of applause, that after the rain, the world is always a little more alive. And everything is new again.

That's all for now.