Through A Storm

It's like driving home through a storm. The water is running underneath your car, what you would like to view as an extension of yourself. It runs in rivulets and pools in pools, feeding on its expected nature, responding to your siren calls. You see it as rain, remember it as rivers, dream it as waterfalls. A mirror runs across your cheek, lost brethren to the music outside, calling from inside you to its lost sisters that commit suicide on your windshields. The rain intensifies. You begin to grow afraid, part from the extremism of current conditions, part a silent shudder running up the stem of your brain rooted in somethings that you will never utter.

It's like the middle of the road home through a storm. The ubiquity of the water is terrifying so you make up rules. Now the road rises, that must mean that I'll see some rivers now but there won't be pools at the top because that's not how water works dammit! Now we're going down so I should expect pools at the bottom, better drive slow. But the truth is, you cannot control the things that truly make this system go: the faults in the drainage.

It's like the end of the road home through a storm. You look back on the road you've made and realize how much you were at the mercy of the drainage system and the thousands upon thousands of feelers it stretches underneath all the cities everywhere. A man went home early, a drainage broke, a pool formed, a fear planted in your heart, a slight moment of lost control. A road suffered more wind since a tree was felled, its edges corroded, a rumbling was set in motion, your foot clenches on the brakes, your eyes tighten. And you lose yourself in this flaw, in this all too human thought about chaos and systems and patterns and random and where you fit in all of this. It comforts you.

It's like the moment when you go to sleep later that evening, after driving home through a storm. A creeping comes upon you, something that mirrors on your cheek, the fear that you felt in the heart of the light, the heart of the noise and absolute silence of storms. You realize you said were. Were at the mercy of the drainage system. But the realization comes upon you, like a predator, where you thought you were safe, it comes upon you. You areat the mercy of the drainage system. You feel the valves that are rooted in the insane pits of your thought, the pipes that are laid from the cistern of your words and you know fear again.

It's like the deep of the night when you're asleep, after driving home through a storm. You seek escape in sleep but even there you can feel the drainage system. Worse than that, more wisdom is forthcoming: sleep is the drainage system. It's the valves and the pumps and the pressure holds and the bolts and the ducts of everything that counts. And it too, is random. No, it's the source of random. Dreams flow forever on corroded roads beneath the ground, where a faint rhythm echoes from the center you imagine to yourself. Reaching, yearning, for the "close" valve, you break your nails on the rusted metal only to discover there is no "close" valve. There is no "open" valve.

There is only driving home through a storm. Only the end of the road through the storm. Only the moment when you go to sleep later that evening. Only the deep of the night when you're asleep. Through a storm.

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