The Faint Scent of Rain

She presses her head against the glass and listens to the rain fall on the other side. Inside the building hums and breathes warmly, keeping up a steady pulse of background noise that wants to lull her to sleep, to draw her in to the comfort and amber- light of her room - and she hears it beckon but her heart is still out there in the dark and the rain, walking the streets - with him.

He smells like the rain and of crumbling walls and sidestreets. She loves it, the warm imaginary smell of damp stone that is never quite the way stone really smells but something almost like the sea - the remembered sea of childhood that is, not like it is today, all thick and polluted like everything else. Things are nolonger the way they were, but of course, in her rational head, she knows they never were. She doesn't dislike it.

And it is funny, she thinks, because she knows that it's rank and wrong outside really. She knows that the sparkle in the air is nothing but a zydrate dream, that the butterflies she sees are really nothing but trash drifting in exhaust fumes. She knows that he smells of death and dumpsters and yet if anybody asked her - which they wouldn't - she would still think first that he smells like rain.

She presses her head against the glass and feels the cool of it caress the inside of her head like the fingers of a man who works with death and makes her feel alive. Fingers that trace across her body in patterns like swirls of silk protecting her like a cocoon where they touch her, making the rest of the world go mercifuly away, just for as long as he is there.

Is this obsession? she wonders. But when she cannot answer she decides that she does not care. Is it something worse? She bites her bottom lip and makes herself think more quietly in the hope that she will not hear her own thoughts (yes, yes, it probably is).

She finds herself wondering if he ever thinks of her. She knows he would deny it if she ever were to ask. She knows this because, for herself, she would laugh him down if he asked her the same thing. Which he wouldn't. She wonders if there is a part of him - any part of him at all - that cares about her even a little and she hates herself for even having so weak and needy a thought. After all she doesn't care about him. Doesn't care at all.

She wonders how safe he is out there, walking in the rain. If he minds it. If he can escape from it at all if he wants to. She wonders again if he is thinking of her while she thinks of him. She'd like him to be thinking of her. She wonders what he is thinking about her if he is thinking about her. She wonders if he would like her to be there, with him, like she wants to be.

She hears the sounds of crashing and violent cursing coming from somewhere too close by in the building for comfort. She flinches slightly, hoping that she won't have to get involved in the latest family melodrama. More than anything she just feels tired and bored of it. She doesn't care, and supposes that makes her the heartless bitch everyone says she is. She doesn't care about that either.

She cares about a man she barely really knows. A man out there in the rain, somewhere in the warren of lights below her. She cares - and she hates this - that he'll get wet and ill, that he won't find anywhere to sleep, that - she stops herself quickly. She doesn't really care about any of these things. Honest to god she doesn't. She doesn't believe in God.

She doesn't want to be here with all this shit. She wants to be out there with the smell of rain close against her. Wants to feel it in her hair and on her skin. She wants to break the glass and let the rain come in, to drown in it and be happy drowning in it forever. She wants to be out there now, chasing the rain down streets that smell of him. To go where she feels alive. To find the centre of this network of veins that calls itself a city. She knows that he will be there, at the centre of everything, smiling that smilke of brightest black that she just wants to kiss forever. . Because that's the happy ending isn't it? - the kiss that lasts forever and banishes the rest of the world away.

She wants it now like the spoilt brat she is asnd knows she is. She hates waiting even though she knows that this is worth waiting for and she will wait only - only supposing he is gone before she gets there? Supposing he is dead by then or worse (and yes it is worse in a way) - doesn't want her any more? Suppose he just shrugs his shoulders and says sorry love, it was fun but it's over, you mean nothing to me, you were just there - yeah she could wind herself up forever imagining the things he could say to her even though she has no reason or place to expect anything from him. Even so imagining it tightens her heart up so bad and yet she can't stop, it's like a road accident and she goes on breaking her heart over it before he can do it for her. With all this strain she really will need a new one again far too soon.

But she can't go out now thsi instant, however compulsive the urge is to just run to him and to hell with the consequences. Judging from how things sound out there she knows someone will do some shitty thing to hold her back if she tries to leave the building right now. So all she can do is wait and hope that there will still be a tomorrow. She sort of thinks she might trust him enough to believe that there will be. That she can still bring herself to trust anyone, even that much, amazes and scares her. She knows that trust only leads to hurt and her heart trembles in preparation to be broken. Yet still she hopes, hopoes so damn hard that there is a chance it might not be.

A dead leaf slaps gainst the window, driven to stick there by the rain and wind. She finds herself open ing the window to bring it in and she sits holding the leaf in her hand, smelling the rain and dampening her fingers with it. She leaves it by her bed when she gets in for the ngiht, and curls up to sleep smiling from the faint scent of rain.