Last night, I dreamed it rained fire.
Today it was Iron and Wine, Stephen King's Tommyknockers, and circling thoughts of stagnant pools of water somewhere inside, old half-dry blood, gone cold and glutinous with exposure.
If this is an existential crisis, I do those as weird as I do everything else.
It rained fire in great, thick, fist-sized globs like napalm that stuck and scalded and were gritty underfoot. Raindrops were coming too in among the burning hail, all of it warm as saliva, as if the sky were drooling. Someone was there; I don't know who. It wasn't you.
We hid under a big, old fashioned movie marquee, and when it didn't help I looked up to see the rain and fire dripping through cracks above, long horizontal cracks that made the hot storm into thin sheets that fell in front of me and behind me, leaving foot-wide paths in between. I spread my arms, my legs, stood like the Vitruvian man and turned my head to the side to keep every part in that narrow dry channel. It didn't help. Fat globules fell on my shoulders and arms. Clear and ruddy red-brown, flecked with black ash, they hurt a little and left huge purple bruises wherever they touched.
We abandoned the shelter, broke and ran. Cracks opened in the street as the sun came out. I was calm and tired, hectically optimistic. I stumbled without surprise and fell quietly into a crevasse. It was a beautiful day.
It's getting smaller and more tangled behind my eyes every day. I feel I've lost purchase. I can stand up against the force of the sea if I have a good, solid stance on a rock. The rock's not gone... I just lost it. Feel like I'm drowning... but it's a beautiful day, and panicking would be such a loud, messy, distracting thing to do. Better to let it be, let it be. There's a sweetness in the stoop, in surrender, and I wouldn't break this serenity for anything. Most of all right now I just want silence... I'm so tired of defending myself and comforting others and making things work and making things right and talking and talking and talking and listening and talking.
Give me your silence, if you love me, and show me the truth in other ways. Give me your gentle eyes and soft hands, your lips lovely and still, the breath that passes burdened by nothing. Give me slow, steady caresses and the sound of your heartbeat. Drown me in your bed and let me sleep.
