The City

It is raining.

It rained yesterday and it will rain tomorrow and the next day and it will rain the whole week. From inside my glass and steel cage, forty stories tall, a bustling hive of progress, I can see the clouds hanging, heavy with rain just above our heads, just above the buildings like a sagging fort of sheets, the product of some overgrown child’s boredom. Today I was that overgrown child. Bored with the screens and numbers, I had watched the weather roll in, tip toeing across the tops of the buildings, from one corner of the city to the other, settling comfortably directly over head. Now on my third cup of coffee, I am watching the suits, like ants, trickle out of the bottom of my building and wondering why I am one of them, wondering what happens when one ant dies. Do the others even stop to notice? Do their six legs even slow for the passing of a fellow ant’s soul?
I think it started when Carol died. You know when a person is the wrinkle around your eyes from smiling too much? When they are the first smell of rain or the fresh salt off of a beach wind breeze? That was Carol. She was the smell of light smoke from a fireplace filled with last year’s firewood, fighting off that unexpected cold snap. She was the beginning and middle and end of your favorite childhood book. She was my best friend.
Five years after we had met and three years into our marriage, Carol and I are driving home from a weekend on the South Shore with the windows down and nothing in the air but the ocean breeze and our own contentment. The sounds of Bill Evans dance in and out of our silence as Carol turns up the radio, only to have the wind tear the notes out into the night air through the back seat windows. That night, her hair still smelled like popcorn and salt air.
There was no hurry with Carol and I, no urgency, just the cool and calm reservations of two people who knew they had each other. I guess that’s why I hate these yuppies sometimes, why I hate myself. I’m so caught up in my quarterlies or my thread count that I forget the smell of saltwater and popcorn. And at the end of the day, I trickle out the base of the hive to find the weather like this, with the clouds from the coast bringing in the warm smell of fresh seafoam and sand and I suddenly find myself somewhere else. I am on the beach, watching the sunrise set fire to the blue blanket ocean and wishing all the ants would just slow down.
It’s hard to find reasons to live or laugh or love in a dark room, and for a long time after Carol, that’s all this city was to me. In a lot of ways, it still is.