Rainy Day.

I was driving into a storm waiting to happen, a horizon composed of blue and gray clouds stacked one atop the other.  Erie had faded behind me, and Cleveland was too far away to see.  I felt like I was in limbo - I was nowhere and anywhere, driving what might as well have been the same mile of highway over and over. Trees, an exit ramp, a bridge.  Repeat.

It always feels weird leaving my hometown.  There's something that feels incomplete and empty, something I can't quite explain - plans conceived in a wild imagination that come to naught for lack of desire, lack of time. A sensation of leaving an important job unfulfilled.  Sometimes it feels like I'm not heading back to my home in Cleveland, but that I'm heading there only for a visit and that I will return to Erie, to my real home.

Driving in limbo, rushing toward a storm.  Somewhere between here and there, almost without space, almost without time.

This emptiness, this loneliness springs forth from a door that pivots on a rusty hinge, a tiny joint that opens and closes the channels of my peace.  In my tunnel vision, that empty space is all that I can see.  All I have, the walls that hold up my whole structure, are blurred along the edges while my focus is centered on that hinge just waiting for it to break, for that door to stop creaking open and slamming shut with every unconscious gust of wind.

I was overcome by an intense sadness, and could feel it hot and stinging in my eyes as tears began to well. Just as they hovered along my eyelashes, it started to rain.  It felt like the sky had taken on my burdens and shouldered my load for a little while.  The clouds cried for me, and I no longer needed to cry for myself.

The thunder even now as I lay here in bed rumbles a message, that all storms pass.  Whatever hides in the darkness will be brought to the light in brief flashes.  The earth needs the rain, and sometimes our souls need depression so that in braving it, we will grow stronger, larger.  Let us soak up the storms so that when the sun shines again, our flowers will bloom.