/ i do not like this exercise

The storm is often no more than sun and light breeze, it is the misguided preparation for inclemency, the mistaken forecast. You find yourself, feeling small, at the corner bus shelter, underneath a bone dry umbrella, that you never realized was colored so brightly before, blue and green in the rain, azure and verdant here, with everyone wondering, what are you so defensive about? It’s perfectly clear.

For years, I wore a tiny wooden pendant over a chest welling with curiosities, an endless capacity for mild incapacities, and sometimes I would let others take turns with the little cross I bore, until it seemed more magnet for stormy Monday mornings, less amulet against the gathering penultimatums. You are so maddening, she might say, and again, it would be perfectly clear.

The storm of sun and breeze, the ragged lines they draw, and is it any wonder we live the where we do. This Spain brings rain and keeps me sane, hers brings drought, keeps her in doubt. The clouds give way and he runs for his umbrella, they return and he swings the little pendant in time with his steps, 1-2, 1-2. I wonder where I will live when the volume I occupy, the mass I carry, becomes so untouchably small that I pass dryly through even the horizontal mists along the coast.

It would have to offer at least the occasional clear day, in order to drive me back inside, where I could get lost in my thoughts, and shrink away and wander aimlessly through old remembered streets, where I would walk in disguise, so as not to be crushed underneath the gigantic staring eyes of familiar footsteps. Even there, where the denizens exist only by the whether of my own imagination, the sun and breeze are clear.