counting on rain

It’s only a song. A heartbreakingly perfect song that played in a tiny café at ten minutes to closing time on an autumn evening when my heart was beating fast and my breath was shallow and the spinning of the earth made me unsteady. I had just sat down when the song began to play, a cup of hot tea warming my hands, my elbows rocking the unbalanced round table. The clerk behind the counter had smiled at us. Did she notice our wedding rings didn’t match? The one in the dining area glared for a moment, seeming to calculate the depth of our distraction, then continued flipping chairs upside-down…

“What kind of quiet is this? I don’t know what kind of quiet. It’s just…quiet. Does everything I do now have to mean something else?” Heidi is frustrated, but not angry. Her brow furrows with both emotions, but with the latter she purses her lips and starts breathing through her nose, exhaling nostril sighs in threes like ellipses, buying time to form a well-reasoned argument. When she finally speaks out of anger, her tone is always deliberate, controlled. Her tone rises now. This is how I can tell she’s frustrated. “I’m sorry.” The words taste bitter on my tongue. “I just want some time alone,” she says. Then she un-furrows…

There was glitter on the back of his left hand. Not craft glitter. The kind found in little girls’ makeup. And hers. He rubbed at it. She defied convention and logic in a thousand ways he loved, and a thousand he despised. Today had been a relentless avalanche of the latter, the result of which sent him to this moment when he doubted everything – their past, their present…their future. It had begun with her denial of his bedtime advances. Technically, they began before the new day had – at eleven thirty seven. But they continued well past midnight, so he considered this the first offense of the new day.…