rain

I was supposed to be $815 toward my sales goal, at the Alamoana Shopping Center when the flash flood began. Steadily restless beyond belief, with barely anyone coming in aside from a few distant trolley & taxi-riders, the heavy hushed downbeat of the weather on pavement outside, and the quick shouts of thunder that excited everyone’s nerves made me still in thinking: there is nothing like windward showers. Folding fresh-factory-made clean cotton into unnatural little squares, I leaned into the smell, noise and splatter outside the perfumed doors. It was like I was watching for the first time, the new computerized versions of classically drawn cartoons I once loved, being depicted as shiny, squeaky, and strange. I ached for home.

Back in my apartment room, downtown Honolulu, the rain just sounds like a bunch of little fingers tip-tapping on a fish tank–thud, thud, thudthud, thududud. I cannot smell, feel, practically taste the rain. Looking through the glass is watching the depiction of rain through a film. There are no swaying slender towerfull coconut trees, no clothes on the clothes line outside getting drenched, no hurried slamming of jalousie windows where water leaks through regardless of their closure, no centipedes digging themselves deeper into the ground, or furthur into the middle of a curled plastic tarp on the grass, no clean loving winds wrapping themselves around every room, and no soggy wooden porches in the  morning; just tiny clear beads of droplets rolling daintilly down the other side of the surface.

“If there isn’t anything you can do about it, cope”, my mantra ever since…well, ever, for moments of paused production over anything I can do nothing about. But this rain, the misty far-away, yet so-near Pali rolls by thick. I’m sitting on 55-            Kaneohe-          Circle Island-     gazing above and below, cars passing the slow, but I never did mind back then when it was a daily occurence, because that was the best 20 minutes. Between class, and work,    I was forcibly allowed to sit, and look.

Anyway, we are always sitting in the middle of many transparencies. I got off of 9:20 going-to-Makaha 40A bus after getting onto it 15 minutes before, and rain is all I am able to think about.

It stopped now, and the sidewalks have slick surface areas. Stepping off the bus I always feel out of my element, constantly watching my back because I don’t know people around town-side, don’t look the part, the eyebrow-lifting quick chin-up  “I-see-you” doesn’t happen for me here…and I can’t figure out how to step so that I am steady and stable…being in these shoes, walking over-through-into, these man-made puddles on Honolulu. I miss stepping out of them, the bare skin of my feet on the ground.