A very special person passed away tonight. She was my friend. She was unique. She was taken too quickly. But she touched so many while she was here, with her endless kindness.
These words are for her. What she meant to me.
Rain
The sky darkens, the air becomes heavy with intent and then the first fat drops crash against his coat.
While others run for cover, dashing through the crashing glassy shards, he stops, looks up, letting the rain roll across his face. He smiles and remembers.
He remembers how she had danced in to his life one day, appearing out of the rain, pirouetting through the puddles.
He was no dancer, so he stood and watched as she skipped and pranced laughing through the downpour.
He forgot about the rain soaking through his drab overcoat, ignored the drops running down his glasses. He just stood there happy to watch her simple joy at being caught in the rain.
She danced on, danced closer, said hello and danced away again. They talked like that for a while as the rain poured on. She told him she always got caught in the rain. The rest of the world rushed by beneath their umbrellas.
And with each pirouette and leap he noticed the rain a little less and saw the spaces in-between instead. She found those little gaps easily and he realised that she saw the world differently. So he listened as she explained how to find those spaces while her dance in the rain went on.
Finally, suddenly, too soon, the dance stopped. She paused, touched him once and then with a giggle skipped away, disappearing into the gaps in the rain that only she could find.
He stood there a moment longer, searching for her lithe fleeting form to reappear but his view became blocked by a grey sea of umbrellas and downturned faces. They went on forever.
The rain slowed, the drumbeat quietening. A few errant drops continued to fall to the ground while the crowds put away their umbrellas and rush on with life.
He paused for a moment longer, really seeing for the first time how the sunlight caught on the drops hanging from the buildings around him. How each drop reflected the world around it in perfect detail, just bending it to its own unique shape.
He liked that thought. He knew she would too.
With that, he took a breath, preparing to leave and realised he was wet. He had forgotten about the rain while the dance went on. As he walked on, wiping away the stubborn rain from his cheeks, he wondered why it tasted salty.
When he got home he took the umbrella from his briefcase and put it away in the cupboard. He knew he wouldn’t need it anymore.
He never saw her again. In fact he wasn’t ever sure if he had really ever seen her in the first place, so brief the encounter. But he would always remember how she had shown him how to dance through the gaps in the rain.
So now he stands there, caught in the rain again. He always gets caught in the rain; it doesn’t bother him.
He only pauses for a moment, to remember, to look through the rain and search for her swirling shape he knows he won’t see.
Then he skips, he was never a dancer, through the gaps as she had shown him, dodging raindrops and those grey umbrellas. A smile on his face.
My words for my dear friend Cat, she was pleasing, always.
