Downpour

The rain came as a surprise, not like the rains in Dublin, where one always carried an umbrella and assumed that at any minute, even if the heavens were blue and breezy, grey misty curtains could close in on the theater of the sky, carrying with them another rainshower. No, this rain descended unexpectedly after weeks of dry, hot sun had desiccated the city, and it arrived all at once, delivered on a swift gale that swept in front of the torrents of water, pushing the air in front of it like the gusts that escape an opened oven.

He stood, nose pressed against the window, bouncing up and down in excitement until his mother finally gave her permission. Running out into the downpour, he circled around and around the backyard, raising his arms up to meet the falling drops of water, palms outstretched, reveling in the cool respite from the summer's monotonous heat. He danced as though observing an ancient ritual, passed down through his little body from the collective unconscious: a communion with the element of water, so basic and simple, so axiomatic, so profoundly powerful in its ability both to create and to destroy.

Serpent of fury

She knew that the rage she felt was completely out of proportion to the trigger that released it. Yet this awareness did not change the fact of it: a seething, white-hot serpent of fury lay coiled round her heart, and just when she thought that it had gone back to sleep, her three-year old came waltzing out of her bed again, giggling, and it reared up, injecting its venom into her veins.

The poison took effect instantly, sending a wave of pressure across her chest, down her arms and up her neck, squeezing her temples and grinding its way into her forehead. I don't have time for this bullshit, she said to herself, as she hustled her child unceremoniously back to bed, barking her displeasure all the way. Her actions inflamed her even more, sending her spiraling into despair for her parenting skills, impatience with her own emotions pounding against her skull. She was so ashamed of the anger that reared its head day after day that she could barely speak of it, and she kept it cloistered away, like Mr. Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre, refusing to recognize it or to know it, its ugliness and wildness an self-imposed weight on her already heavy heart.

Culture shock

Their conversation had begun amiably enough, because in Austin, it seemed to him at least, all conversations begin amiably. But even speaking about the weather got under his skin in a gnawing sort of way, like the constant concern that maybe he was sitting right over a colony of fire-ants. I mean, it's like a million and five degrees outside, and it's 11 o'clock at night, he thought to himself, as his new acquaintance expounded on the joys of living in a sub-tropical climate -- but he smiled and nodded all the same.

When the conversation turned to politics, however, his apathy waned and the spirit of righteousness and indignation that had been baked into his very core took the reins. He had a lot to say about Washington DC, not to mention the World Bank's follies and Bono's naivité. As he hit his stride, he noticed a look of -- concern? pity? etched on this near-stranger's face. I get freaked out about that stuff too, but I just try to remember, all of this is part of the way, the path. Everything is working out for our highest good. Everything is gonna be okay, the man said, sympathetically patting him on the shoulder.

His temper flared and he felt his eyes bulging as he strained to keep himself from shouting across the room. In the end he was able to restrain himself to a terse but heartfelt, You know what? No. No, everything is NOT going to be okay. He turned on his heel, deposited his half-drunk bottle of Shiner in the recycle bin, and walked directly back to his apartment, where he bought a plane ticket back to Boston, and gave his landlord 30 days notice.

Mortal birth

It wasn't until after her first child was born that she developed a fear of flying. Before that the risk inherent in launching oneself twenty thousand feet into the air had seemed almost joyous, a liberation, a brush against the breath of god. She would close her eyes in meditative repose and let her fate wash over her, accepting the possibility of death as one of many equally valid potential paths.

Now she sat, her back rigid against the narrow seat, her sleeping baby cradled across her chest, ignoring FDA regulations, because really, if they crashed, would that subtle difference in position save him? It was the same logic she had used in high school to justify hurtling down the country roads around her home in her vintage VW bug, wearing no seat belt. At that time, however, her decision was motivated by a cavalier trust in benevolence of the universe. With the birth of herself as a mother that shell of trust had been shed, leaving her raw, vulnerable to the searing pain of mortality.

Palm Sunday

When they woke, sun was pouring through the window of their compartment, and they realized that the train was standing quietly at the end of the line. How long they had been there was anyone's guess; as they scrambled out onto the deserted platform, she wondered if anyone ever would have bothered to wake them, or if they would have been allowed to drift on, unconscious, to the next destination.

Getting a room was more difficult than they had imagined it would be, but they didn't put it together until they boarded a bus headed towards the Vatican, packed with dozens of people carrying large branches of palm. It was strange to find herself on the outside of a metaphor so central to her culture, like a teetotaler arriving in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day, awkward and displaced, intrigued but not really curious, suspicious that she had never really woken that morning, but had instead accidentally fallen into someone else's dream.

Escape

The dry heat that had reigned over the city for months had given way to a steaming humidity as the previous night's rain evaporated from the streets. He sat in his car at the stoplight, and, delayed by the queue of rush hour vehicles in front of him, was fiddling with his iPod when a figure on the sidewalk caught the corner of his eye.

The man was working the horizontal grate of a metal-framed trash barrel; now he was deftly, expertly swinging it open and pulling it out to examine its contents. His face was not unattractive, and he was tall and gaunt, his matted dreadlocks spilling out over his shoulders like the mane of an underfed lion. Despite the heat, his clothing hung in layers of ragged folds down the length of his arms and legs, enveloping his body in its volumes. His movements were confident and directed as he swooped into the barrel, recovering a bag with a half-eaten sandwich and half-empty bottle of Coke, remnants of another's excesses.

As he sat there in his car, he felt a captive audience to this man's private moment, and a wave of empathy welled up from deep in his gut. He thought of the nights, years before, when he too had longed to escape the shackles of modern living. Unable to sleep, he had fled into the inhospitable urban wilderness, wandering in the cold until finally finding refuge under a fire escape, where looking up, the stars had appeared, dimly reaching out from the heavens, obscured by the glow of the city but dignified nonetheless.

Spiral staircase

He just couldn't get over the stairs in the place, spiraling up into the ceiling, the shiny wood steps guarded by a graceful banister of brushed steel. Who can afford an apartment like this at our age? Six years of graduate school had taken a toll on his finances and his morale, and he sighed to himself as he wondered why he had started the program in the first place. Art History? So I could get a job? The webs of delusion that he could spin to justify a decision knew no limit in their density and reach.

Of course now that he was almost finished, there was no point in quitting, or analyzing, or standing here in this goddamn corner of this swanky apartment when he could be networking, or at least enjoying himself. His wife was chatting animatedly to a stranger across the room, and his drink was empty. He could get a refill and then casually join her conversation...yes, that was a plan. Uprooting himself from his misery, he headed to the kitchen for another Tanqueray and tonic.

Danube

She paused in her walk across the bridge to have a good long stare at the river below, feeling like shattered glass, the pieces scattered in all directions from the point of impact, and she left to gather the chards from crevices and underbellies. It wasn't her heart that was broken -- she'd felt that before, the suffocating knot in the pit of the soul, the despair...no, this was a blow to the shell, an invitation to expand.

Still, it was painful. The white anger that constricted her wrists and ankles was not directed at him so much as at herself, her own self-imagined shortcomings, and her inability to accept her own reaction, drop it and move on. Brown with mud and swift in its journey through the city, this river was no longer the gentle, innocent waters that tumbled playfully through quaint German villages. She breathed its energy into the depths of her lungs then broke her communion and continued on her way.

East Village

It had seemed like a lot of money at the time, but looking back on it, the one-bedroom apartment they had shared with three other people seemed like a bargain for the location. Of course the view was the brick backside of another building and the black metal fire escape from their own; the light filtered down through this narrow urban canyon in hazy wafts of grey and gold. But it wasn't like they spent any time there, anyway, other than to sleep or cook the occasional pot of pasta.

How silly to get all sentimental over that ridiculous apartment, like pining for a can of sardines! She snapped out of her recollection and back into their current debate, deciding on two olive trees for the front yard, but her heart wasn't in it. It was wandering the crowded, grimy streets around that apartment, ducking into the cupcake boutique, arguing for classicism at the modernist gallery, and ordering beer by the pitcher to wash down the packs of cigarettes they smoked to fuel their long, sleepless nights.

Bender II

What none of them could figure out was how he had gotten into the apartment. Even he was vague on the details, insisting that he had come in through a locked window a good eight feet above the ground. Still, the fact remained that sometime in the wee hours of the morning, he had appeared in the wrong bed, sending its rightful occupant shuffling through the hallway and out to the refuge of the couch.

His phone had vanished at some point in the evening's revelry, the only clue to its whereabouts a series of charges for calls made to Paraguay near dawn on a Sunday. The Polaroids, however, were intact, a linear series of snapshots that gave structure and meaning to the blurred thread of a memory that formed the foundation of his tale of mirth and woe: himself, the quixotic hero adventuring on the high seas of Wicker Park, consorting with the locals and ultimately triumphing over a misdirected cabby and a slumbering, fastened garden apartment.

Bender I

When he finally resurfaced, he looked like a tom cat who had been on a round of the neighborhood. Still, this time he only had a black eye; the rest of the effect came mostly from the dirt and the torn cuff that dangled down from the sleeve of his leather pea coat. On a tip from a source at the Mitte Bar, his friend had found him near Tacheles and, relieved and irritated, had brought him straightaway to their apartment.

Now it was phone calls to cover his shift at the bar, to reassure their other friends that he had, as usual, turned up, and he was, as usual, okay, or would be after a good sleep. Meanwhile, unwilling or unable to answer any questions about the gaping hole in time since they last saw him whole and unblemished, he sat dreamily in the corner of the living room, on a plush, ancient wood-framed chair, mumbling incoherently about the origin of the term "beyond the pale".

First date

From where she was working, she could see across the yard of trees and glimpse the row of dignified brick buildings through the fog. She picked this place particularly because of the view, and because of the probability of interruption. Reading mathematics on a Friday afternoon could easily turn into a soporific chore.

A glass door swung open, and as she glimpsed him entering the space, she dropped her eyes to her work and tried to look industrious. He strode past her and across the room, his hair pulled back into a burnished orange ponytail, thick and wavy against the crimson of his sweater, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his paint-spattered corduroys. She lost herself in an exercise concerning open sets, so that she really was surprised when he appeared at her table.

He sat down and as they chatted, she struggled internally to work up the gumption to ask him to meet for coffee, as though that simple suggestion would expose every vulnerability of her psyche, as though speaking those words were tantamount to confessing a hidden corner of her soul. As he got up to leave, she heard her own voice betraying her as if she were observing it from afar, spilling the request out onto the surface between them. Sure, he replied. How about Thursday?
 
He left her to her books and disappeared into the misty yard of trees. Now that the moment had passed, she felt as though it had always existed, a singularity in an infinite sea of potential, waiting in the wings for her to manifest it.

Army of bees

Zipped into the white cotton armor of the trade, she took a breath of anticipation, pried the cover from the beehive and slowly, slowly set it aside. The bees, anxious of the disruption in their home, issued forth from the frames of wax and honey, then retreated under the pillow of smoke that followed.

She proceeded checking the frames for signs of good health, observing the gathering masses of fuzz and wings, each individual insect simultaneously independent and integral. As she sprinkled the antibiotics around the edge of the hive, she saw their common plight. The illness itself was not the problem, but only the symptom of a darkness, a deep-seated yearning of an injured soul, trying with all its might to externalize the wound. The illness was not the end but the beginning, a call for help and attention, a call to arms in a war against the pain and bliss of the modern world.

Still life with cappucino

Once upon a time he had known how to deal with this situation. So when he entered into it, it was with an illusion of control, an illusion that he had meticulously maintained up until this breaking point, this shattering of the protective layer of ice-cold emotion that he wore underneath his charming southern irony.

And so he sat in the cafe, bleary-eyed and confused. His hand rested unsteadily on a perfect cup of cappucino, complete and undisturbed with eddies of creamy foam meandering through swirls of umber. As his mind strayed from the previous evening and into communion with his coffee, he recognized the emptiness of the moment. A cylinder of ash crumbled from his neglected cigarette onto the table, a pigeon alighted on the opposite chair, and the clock tower chimed half past the hour, marking the passing of the dawn into day.

Routine

It was hard to make herself care, but perhaps even harder to make herself not care. Standing in front of the mirror, she leaned in close so that her nose was almost touching the glass, then plucked a stray strand of eyebrow out of its follicle. Maybe if I put on some make-up, she thought. It had been so long since she had had time for make-up she could barely remember whether she had ever worn it on a regular basis.

Her phone buzzed impatiently and she broke her concentration to look at the message. Opening the phone, she skimmed the message and noticed the time; she was running late. Again. Shoving her feet into her shoes, she felt a pinching annoyance at her feet, at her eyebrows, at the color of her shirt, and she noticed her breathing constricting. It is definitely harder not to care, she thought, and she slammed the door behind her.

January in Cadiz

Cadiz rolled itself up like an armadillo during the last of the winter months. Of course the weather cooperated by providing a warm yellow sun during the day, and at night it was still most pleasant to sit outside in the moonlight for hours on end. But she noticed that her heavily accented Spanish was less welcome than usual in the few local shops and restaurants where she was not yet recognized as part of the community.

They gathered in small groups at this time of year, and as always she was at the center of one of them, like the eye of a hurricane, calm and still and barely audible but to the people directly beside her, who would lean towards her to catch her confidences. Another pack of children, laughing and breathless, hurtled out of the darkness and past their little corner of the town. The conversation continued, but all eyes at the table followed the herd as though taking inventory: Pablo, Irene, Alvaro...

She pulled out her zig zag and peppered the crease with tobacco, then proceeded to roll the whole thing up into a toothpick imitation of a cigarette. She paused in her story to light the thing, then let it dangle absently until it had expired. The stone walls of the buildings blended into the cobbled stone of the street, and a salty breeze settled into her nose. Perhaps it's time to go home, she thought.

Morning coffee

A tangled mess of fig ivy had overgrown the yard, creeping along the fence and up the ancient tree trunks, and sprawling over the ground. In the mornings, coming down the stairs on the side of the house they would often comment on the uselessness of the yard, but it didn't matter anyway as they were rarely at home.

Their favorite coffee shop was a five minute walk through the neighborhood, but the yard was forgotten when they reached the end of the driveway. By the time they had ordered their lattes they had captured and released three different projects, and their thoughts were consumed by an endless stream of logistics, strategy, critique and analysis.

Washing clothes

The laundromat where they used to wash their clothes every third Saturday marked the halfway point on his walk home from the train. Now the idea of washing clothes that infrequently seemed quaint, a sort of fairytale existence in which you sat in a cafe and ate delicious raspberry muffins with a sweet and delicate crumb on top, while fluffy white dogs, eminently well-behaved, passed you by without so much as a nod to your existence. Then after a couple hours of pleasant reading, you would people-watch while folding at the laundromat counter, conveniently mounted in a street-side window.

Now, pushing the stroller in front of him as he walked the long blocks home, he pined after those raspberry muffins and wondered to himself why it seemed like such a feat to simply cross the street, enter the bakery and buy a couple for breakfast the next morning. He noticed that the light was fading and picked up his pace. Maybe tomorrow.

New day

She awoke with a jolt that resulted in a pounding head, aching shoulders and a knot underneath her third chakra, as though the alarm itself had injected the events of the previous day back into her head. Immediately her mind was racing with doubt and regret, and grasping for a thought that didn't make her feel like a sinking ship, she rolled onto her side and looked out the window.

The new day glowed green through the grey dawn. From where she lay in the bed she could see the garden, a swath of potential on the verge of bearing fruit. Through the darker greens of leafy growth, the yellow-orange trumpeting squash blossoms and pale, round, firm beginnings of tomatoes winked at her. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, relieved that yesterday was over.

Tenacity

Setting the guitar aside, she sat staring at the blank white page in front of her. Songwriting had seemed like such a fun idea but when it came down to it, it was hard work like everything else. Now that she had a record deal, the romance was gone, and the relationship between herself and her music felt like it had been stripped down to the sinews, with nothing between her and failure but the thread of confidence extended from the recording studio.

She'd felt this way before, when? Reflecting back, she flipped through memories one by one until she hit upon it. They were sitting on his bed, she and her first boyfriend, after a couple months of dating, when he looked at her and said, I love you. No you don't, she said immediately. She didn't mean it to be rude, it was just honest. You don't even know me. It turned out that it was far easier to share her body than to offer up her soul for inspection.

That was when it occurred to her, a comment Joseph Campbell made about marriage. It's an ordeal. It has nothing to do with being happy. It has to do with being transformed. She picked the guitar back up and dropped her expectations of how the love affair with songwriting would unfold. Here was this moment, the music, herself. She was in this for the long haul.