From a third floor balcony that looks out level with the road, I watch what is surely cold rain under the shelter of the fourth floor balcony and by exceedingly warm streetlights. The yellow glow comes to me from either direction, shimmering through each raindrop in between and shining off the glossed, gravel-strewn surface.
At a far distance, maybe 500 feet, the light travels through an unmoving mist. If I could neither see nor hear anything nearer, I might not know that it is raining, but even with eyes shut, the constant patter is unmistakable, and though uninviting, it welcomes me out of my comfortable living room through a half-opened sliding glass door.
Around 200 feet it is possible to see some distinction in the rain, drops falling, not distinctly in themselves, but as one mass, a sheet of a sort, making an unmistakable and constant descent: the sky pulled down to the ground. I can see the rain.
I’m guessing the closest streetlight is about 100 feet away, and here finally I can see individual drops fall, in a wave as the downpour increases for some moments, but even in the deluge the drops are no longer only part of something more. This close, each drop distinguishes itself and measures a line to the next drop, which presents a depth to the next drop in turn. A distance of about 100 feet is measured in these fleeting increments.
My hoodie hugs my back and my belly, and the hood whispers a sunny breath on my neck, and the sharp contrast of the cool air I inhale reminds me of a kiss a decade old. She must have been breathing through her mouth, which I suppose was unusual, because her cool lips and cool tongue were a surprise that have stuck with me these years. Warmly holding her in my arms, I was struck by that coolness, which did not long precede a distance that we did not know at the time would abide. Well, all I can say for sure is that I didn’t know.
Tonight I stand, no, sit, well, I’ll stand, why not? Tonight I stand under cover and watch and listen to the falling rain, reflecting on the separation that sometimes just happens, or perhaps two people explicitly agree to it, or one chooses, and the other slowly, very slowly comes to accept it, or in times extraordinary as these, has been mandated.
It is not possible to measure from drop to drop, but I see and can sense, however momentary and vanishing each instance is, that there is space between the rain. It grows into a tangible curtain between me and the mid-distance. And the curtain, with enough separation, melts into a dreamy haze. On the other side of otherworldly fog and cloud live my family in further neighborhoods. There live my friends down in the city and out in the country. There, where a plane could take me if they were flying far enough and returning somewhere they are not, I might know the proximal, hopeful love that is so familiar to the young.
As it is, nothing, nothing is near when means of division fall an arm’s length away, out there in a withdrawn world below the opened sky.