Its Raining at PSC

I thought I would enjoy it more......

It looks so beautiful, how the sun light hits the rain. I saw many colors staring into it but none of them were like I have seen before. I saw colors that were not even there- colors that vibrated and rippled when the rain contacted with the sidewalk. It reminded me of chalk against a black top. How pure and earthly chalk can be.....how firm the substance begins in ones hand and when imagination is released it becomes merely powder, so soft as if like feathers or how feathers are stereotyped to feel and be.

I stood in the center of the courtyard in the rain.

It is here now, while I write, that I realize how soft and loose the rain fell around me and how suddenly I felt warm. Again my mind lingers to the pink chalk that once laid in my hand as I began drawing hearts and daisies and lines. Lines that curved and swam beneath my crude attempts of drawing; lines that made me happy. So happy I would search and pull familiar strangers to praise what I believed beautiful only to find no one. Where was I? What sidewalk did I grace with that child innocence that one only hears in a story book? I want to remember!

I sit here in the library, feeling my heart slow in my chest. The black top. Black concrete meshed with sand and dirt-the sudden stop before the dip of the hill it was planted against. No white lines just a blanket of dark rocks.
I remember spending my recess with that dark, huge monster of concrete just lulling myself to sleep with my worries and tears, with my secret passions and needs. Feeling the warmth it provided from hours of collecting sunlight. Sometimes the black top became to hot and I would lay my jacket along its belly to sheild my head and limbs from its scorn.

No. It was never scorn or rage. The intense heat was of protection; I was safest at school when I was laying in that warmth (no one dared to step foot on it when the sun shined). And I remember sleeping for what seemed hours, lost in those dreams that were so vivid and wild and bitter. I remember refusing to wake up when my teachers cryed out for me because my dreams seemed so much more alive and true. I even remember how those same teachers would abondon me, how the class would leave me there sleeping on the black top and how I would wake up and find out how I had missed several classes, even of how I would find myself dripping and shivering and cold in class because I had been rained on while asleep.

No one knew I wasn't in class.

I sit here laughing now, breathing in the perfume of toxins and of foreign sweat and hand sanitizer. Do you know what its like? To taste and feel and smell real air? or real rain? I do. Its an experience one is seldom to ever find in a closed life.

But I have tasted it.

I have felt and smelled the air and rain.

I remember it so clearly, the Virginia air and the mountain rain....

In springtime the grass had a slick sheet of dew that sweetned the smell of the wind and the trees to such extravagent measures breathing in tasted like an ocean of magnolias and pixie sticks. It was horribly sweet and if you were not careful it would slice your tounge and make your teeth feel hollow.

In the summer, the leaves of every tree seemed to wilt from the sun light and it made the air feel more compact and stiff. Running through the air was like sprinting through rice paper walls and it made one very aware and alert to the surrounding forest. It tasted of the deer and of wet hickory.

The fall was my favorite flavor. The air was crisp on the tounge and cruely chapped the lips of anyone who step outside. It tasted of cinnamon and basil and of tree bark, the smell of freshly decayed leaves and mountain peak snow overwhelming. The rain fell sharp like daggers and tasted of iron and ice.

It was the winter air and the winter snow that will pound in my mind forever. Layers of jackets and socks and mittens and earmuffs could not prevent the air from cutting the very bone as you step outside. The rainfall would crystalize and become snow before it would hit the ground and one could breath out smoke rings and shap the released air before it would fall in your hand and harden. It smelled of snow and of thick metals and the feeling was of sadness. It was a sadness so cruel any man would fall to his knees and cry, asking God to end the madness that was Virginia snow.