rain turning to snow

Nights this time of year when the sky lets loose its heavy wetness, the roads are slick, and black and loud with my passing. The ground, as if it were so greedy for every last bit of light that it condensed down upon itself with a gravity too strong for any small sliver of luminosity to escape, and be reflected back. Dark. Impossible to see the lines in the pavement, the path I cut was wide, and sloppy.

I parked under a fluorescent outpost, so that I could keep the interior of my faithful partner obscured to the world without, to keep the wolves away. Rain playing a staccato melody on the roof, and windows, and the thick tactility of the pages under my fingers released a ghost of old office buildings, cigarette smoke, and coffee. The smells of my trade, no matter where it might be plied. My eyelids tried their best to fight as I sat, nostalgically, and fell asleep.

Open with a panic, heart racing, look at the clock, was that a minute? more? look around, is everything still here, am I still here?

Car in drive, I swore off the lack of movement for the rest of the bible-black morning. I finished half of my first infinity circle when the sporadic brake lights ahead and late and improper turn summoned me. Blue and white lights made the rain look like falling sapphires, exploding into a strobing river in the road. He looked so young, was so young, and smelled of very old smoke, and dirty clothes that had been piled on the floor. And he told me the same story, recycled over and over by others who came before him. Of a mistake being made, of him taking care of it, of just not having the right paperwork, of there needing to be an exception made.

I looked at him in the rear view mirror as we made our way back to my home base, and he looked so small, resigned. A wayward country mouse. His pupils were so constricted from whatever he had done to himself that it seemed he only had iris. And they both looked back into the mirror, and they hated me. He would not speak to me, after saying yes to the admissions I phrased like questions, and after he had changed, and the door had closed, he sat on the concrete catatonic, like a little Buddha, and I wondered what the drugs were doing in there, past the iris and pupil and brain stem.

But more than that I wondered when it was I'd understand the why part. And if I could, if it presented itself to me. Or if perhaps I was starting to surpass my ability to empathize, with such a line of thought. And the last hour I set out back into the rain, in a sort of aloof isolation, as if I had let someone down. As if I could have made it right somehow, but didn't.

And when I got home, Marcus Aurelius said Nothing happens to anyone that he can't endure. Things have no hold on the soul.