Love, Lose, And Repeat

April Showers

Whenever it rains she stands at the front door in dripping skin. Drenched down to her bare feet, she asks to come in. She shivers, she shakes, she asks to be back, but I can't let her back. She's dripping on my patio and all I do is open the door a crack to see her once more, but I can't let her through that door.

She only comes back when it rains. I don't know where she walks from. I just see her standing there, nose up to air, eyes open, counting raindrops that tick onto pink skin. I'm think of moving every spring. I can't take the waiting and wanting the rain, to feel it come on, and then don't want the pain when its watering my lawn.

Whenever it rains I think about the ten months and eight days that she stayed away. I hope that ten months served her well because the months to me...they were hell. I had to remember to set my alarm, because she wouldn't be waking me up. I kept making an extra omelette in the mornings--just in case she showed up. Lies, that's what I told my parents, so they wouldn't like her less. My parents--who when they first met--she was so eager to impress.

Months of new jobs, and just scrapping by. Bills barely paid on time. I called her until my number was blocked. My father got ill, died last June, and me and Maggie still hadn't talked. I never found out where she went. I imagined her on vacation, on some beach or a desert that rain never touched, because more than me and more than herself--she loved rain so much.

It all comes back like single drops of rain. It comes back fast, falling all over me--drenching me, heavy, too heavy to hold. Fast. Eyelashes, fingertips, her smell in the morning. It rolls off me and over me again. It hits hard, cold, all over pain--But that's just whenever it rains.

My mother tells me its my nerves. I am thinking too much. She says to turn off my brain like I'm turning off a faucet. My sister says she's in my head that she left with the rain. But all of the April showers that took my Maggie didn't take the pain. It doesn't matter my father is dead, because he never said much anyway. He'd just stare from his favorite chair and say: Son, It looks like rain.