Secrets of a Rainy Night

The night feels very close tonight, enclosed, as if it's drawn itself around us.

There was a rain shower earlier, a surprisingly cold one, and I had to go out in it. The feeling started then, I think. Dashing around, as if I could avoid getting wet. But it was the kind of rain that just makes you laugh. There's no point in trying to stay dry. Might as well get wetter.

The rain stopped after a few minutes. Here and there, little patches of mist rose from the ground. The flowering bushes seemed to lean toward us, the hedges making little tunnels to walk through. It all felt very different, as if the ordinary world had been replaced with a secret one.

Indoors, it was the same, as if the night had come inside too. The hallway was another tunnel, with soft glowing lights. Mysteries in every corner. It does feel like that; as if the night has a secret, and you could know what it is, if only you knew how to listen the right way.

Even if I knew it, I would never tell.

Fried Food And Heartbreak

It was one of those stupid teenage crushes, stupid because it was doomed from the start. Even worse than that, the fact that he didn't like me had begun to seem like a point in his favor.  

Sigh.

Low self-esteem will make you do the most ridiculous things.

The stupidity of all this didn't mean it didn't hurt. Golly gee whiz it hurt. I was quite sure I was dying. The only way I could think to ameliorate this condition was to go down to the water park and lie there like a dead dog in the lagoon.

Oh, I could have been more active, climbed to the top of the water slides and such, but whenever I did that, I'd just end up scanning the horizon, wondering where he was. Or, there was a chance that I'd see his 1968 Dodge Dart tooling around the streets below. Possibly with another girl by his side.

Nope, it had to be the lagoon for me, floating in my inner tube of anguish. When droplets of water hit the rubber, they sizzled like bacon grease, but so what? There was the sound of people laughing as they splashed around, and Graham Parker on the radio. At least they hadn't rejected me. Well, not explicitly.

The food stalls next to the lagoon gusted delicious frying smells across the water. Cheeseburgers. Churros. Funnel Cakes. Regardless, I was unmoved. There's nothing like a bad romance to kill an appetite. Probably I didn't eat another bite until October, but that's beside the point.

The point is that I went down there again today, to the food stalls next to the lagoon, and I thought damn, what do you know? After all these years, fried food still smells like heartbreak.


image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Funnel_cakes#/media/File:Funnel_cake_2