Caught in the rain

I’m naked at my bar.

Clothes on the floor.

Wet.

I got caught in the rain.

It’s that time of year in the A.

Movin’ into June.

It was a pop-up shower.

And it just caught me.

Cold drop after cold drop.

And I just stopped.

I’ve done this once before.

I don’t really remember the trauma I was surviving at that point.

I just remember I was walking out of Target—

The sky just opened,

and I started to run to my Jeep.

Everyone else was running too.

Running through the drops.

Through the burst.

And so was I.

Making my way to my car,

bags on my wrists.

And—

I just—

stopped.

I did.

I just stopped there.

In the middle of the parking lot.

And let the rain fall.

And it did.

It pummeled down.

It was cold.

I stretched out my arms.

I just let it fall.

I was cold and drenched—

and in a fucking parking lot.

But—

I stretched out my arms and just let it hit me.

I just—

connected.

To the earth.

To the forces beyond—whomever they are.

To the drop beyond drop pummeling into the ground,

and my cold shoulders.

It was—

so very precious.

That was in my 20s.

The same thing happened tonight.

I’d been with M & A on a garden tour in Midtown.

I was walking home.

And—

the bottom dropped.

It dropped, “like it weren’t nothin’”

I don’t know if you have that sayin’—

my brother-in-law said it to me first.

We were watchin’ Atomic Blonde.

And he said,

“She just whipped their ass with a garden hose like it weren’t nothin’.”

I marked it.

It seemed right.

And that’s how the rain fell tonight.

Like it weren’t nothin’.

It fell—

same as it always does.

Down.

Down to the ground.

Like there never was a boy,

and I never was 20,

and the ducks didn’t kick across Lake Clara in Piedmont Park,

and the ice didn’t dilute the drinks in Blake’s,

(which just by the way it doesn’t)

and like W Peach didn’t need a bath.

It fell—

the same way it always has.

And it fell on me.

And I walked through.

And now the sun is out at 7:50 PM.

And it’s setting—

just the same.