Why, Why, Why

It rained all day today, and I with it. Silently misting, pooling in my eyes, battering the earth, streaming down my cheeks, dripping from the gutters, rain fell all day, as if we would fall for evermore. What can I make from rain though? Only rivers and seas too strong for me to stand against. Now evening comes, let me close my swollen eyes and breathe frost across the sodden tableau. Let me dress this rain as snow.

Now these drips gather to perfect tentacles of translucent ice, precipitous and deadly sharp. These streams tighten and still to silvered slicks, mesmerising and treacherous. But these flakes cloak the earth with caressing fragments, each perfect and unique. Each imbued with the power to numb. Amidst the muffling snow, these pools gleam, a frozen invitation to skate above the depths, and this mist gauzes the gaping night beyond.

Ornamented, bejewelled, beautified, I cast this rain into snow, a simple cooling of water, a transformation from gushing to exquisite hush, from flow to stoppered ice. Here I can draw cool air into drowned lungs and listen to the riming of the chambers of my heart. Here I can lay my hand across your remembered face and feel only brute absence, the lines and folds lost to numbed fingers. Here I can look upon the glade of our garden and furnish it with beauty, layered thick over mud, falling as if grief is lighter than water, knowing it will soon melt back to rain.