the habit of being

When I am sitting in the car at night and it is raining and you are driving us to see someone and the drops are streaking down the windows and we are not talking to one another because talking would be too loud, I think that all the rain must come from women who have lost their babies, and if there were no more tears, if there were no more sadness, the grasses would become brown and the ground would become sandy and all the trees would go thirsty and the world would stop going. But that is not really what I think, I know it isn’t, because that sounds like a story and actually it isn’t like that until I try to tell it. It is a wordless hum and a hollow sphere of cloth in my head. From the center of the sphere, I am grabbing at the cloth and pulling it toward me from many angles all at once. I look out at the raindrops. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops. I follow the raindrops as they leave the edge of the window. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops and through them at the same time. I become the raindrops and the window and the blurry wet red tail-lights going and the blurry wet white head-lights coming and the highway and the sadness and the shadows of trees that I cannot see because it is too dark out but I know they are there. It doesn’t matter where we’re going or who it is we’re going to see, because I can already see them, I can see everyone, and I can hear you even though we’re not talking, and I can hear my thoughts even though they are wordless and I can hear the silence and the hum and the engine and the crying of women who have lost their babies. I see now that I am not the only such woman. I leave the raindrops with my eyes but I do not leave them and I look at your thigh. You’re wearing new jeans and they have lighter stripes on them to make them look older than they are. I put my hand on the denim and I can feel the heat of your skin underneath and I look at my hand on your thigh and I cannot believe how beautiful my hand is, how it seems to glow more brightly even than the little blue lights on the dash or the red tail-lights going or the white head-lights coming, and you know not to talk to me because that is how well you know me.