Rainy Days

val

They call him Rain.

They say that he is a walking disaster, that he never speaks because his words are like hurricanes and tornadoes all curled up in one. They say that he's dark and that he's dangerous, that he's spent the last one thousand and eighty days locked up in a prison and that it had taken the police two whole years to finally catch him and take him in.

They don't say anything about what he did.

He smokes cigarettes, I'm told, and he's never without a fresh packet scrunched up in his left pocket. He carries his lighter loaded in the creases of his right hand.

They say that he has a motorbike that he rides at reckless speeds in the middle of the night when the sky is dark and starless. That there are ugly scars on his rigid belly and dirty bruises that never fade on his legs.

He's a highschool dropout, a failure, forced here by a world that best passed its time by ignoring his existence; he's a useless body full of useless substance who is completely content with killing himself slowly; he's a long, long song with no words yet too many lyrics all at once. A song with no tune and no harmony but instead, so much dissonance.

He's everything that I'm not.

I bite down hard on the end of the chipped pencil, and begin to write.