A Special Day

God I loved days like this. It was dim in my apartment, the light subdued by the clouds that were letting loose a gentle rain. I hadn’t turned on the lights. Every morning I turned on every light, pulled back every curtain and filled the space with bright. But not today, this special day, this wonderful, wet day so foreign to California.

“Can’t beat the weather,” was the refrain from any and every one who heard I was from New York and was waiting for the day I could return. Oh, but you can, I’d think, smiling back so as not to disrupt their presumption that I, too, loved the sunny monotony.

I didn’t. I longed for the personality of those days where you could see the frozen mist of your breath in the mornings and then swim in the lake in the afternoon. Or when you’d be out for a walk in a t-shirt and suddenly the sky would darken with the threat of hail. That was drama. That was attitude. Not this, this, ease.

I sighed. My husband was sleeping late, his first opportunity to do so in…? I made a conscious decision not to begrudge him the loss of time we could have been spending together.

I had work to do but I wanted just a little longer with my thoughts. The morning's meditation had done little to subdue them but today, I welcomed them. They weren't running frantically around, taunting me to lasso them like wild horses; they oozed through my brain like tree sap, calmly coating each cell, forcing it to spend a moment taking it in. They were comforting.

I thought back to an evening in New York. I had worked in a restaurant then and it was storming outside and our tables were empty. This middle aged couple appeared outside the big front window, a tall white man with greying hair and a smaller, darker woman around the same age. He stood, watching her from the safety of his umbrella, a smile set deep in the grooves of his vanilla face. She twirled in circles in front of him, a rebel with arms outstretched, holding the shoes she had discarded to be closer to the man-made earth. Her face was turned up with a look of joy as the drops beat down. They weren’t the sensual drops of romantic films--they were hard, punishing pellets that scraped the sidewalks clean. But she acted like she didn’t mind, like she loved it. I didn’t believe her.

When they came in she sat on the long wooden bench, water puddling beneath and streaming away from her in all directions, her clothes matted to her full frame. She looked beautiful, wild with the promise of a fresh start for them both. I gathered they didn’t know each other well. A first date, maybe a second. I watched the man watch her hopefully, and I wondered if he saw through her too. Did her act impress him? Or did he, too, sense all the pain and the desperation that she was hiding under a sodden blouse and feigned carelessness? I don’t think he did.

I could have been making it up. Or projecting my own lack of identity and sense of lost youth onto this strange woman who, like me, had clearly been waiting her whole life for someone to tell her she was magic. But I still cried a little that night, for the woman. Why hadn't I just told her?

That day felt so far away now. I was glad it was gone.

I would drink coffee today. Decaf. I never drank coffee anymore. But today was special. So there, in the gloom, I would cherish a cup and wait for my husband to wake up so I could overjoy him with our news.