The sound of water hitting glass fills the room for the first time since arriving in Berlin. It sounds like an infinite heard of feet running home, following the gravity of this place homeward bound to the ground, where they want and need to reside. There is no other place for this rain. It must fall. Es muss. Wie gehtz? Es muss. Just like time cannot stop, neither can gravity. neither can love, for that matter. Neither can the sound cease to be made into something else. It seems as if it can never just be rain. It calls back memory of events that it oversaw, that you saw through it, sounds of other forms of water, sounds unrelated to the physicality of water, but not so unrelated as you might think. It recalls the time when you were caught in a five minute thunder storm in Rome that changed the Tiber from a murky, but soft and sweet, green to a menacing and solid brown. It recalls every river in the world. Floods. Draughts. Parching tongues. And ocean tones (perhaps real, perhaps recorded and played on loop). It cannot stop. Certainly no more than can the blinking of a cursor on the black slate window. And certainly no more than love.
Love is a tricky word. I think I love Berlin. But I don’t think I’ve earned it yet.
The rain falls and I am at once whisked back to falls, winters and springs in Seattle. I woke up and as soon as I recognized the sound familiar to my ears I smiled a broad smile that was uncontrollable to my lips. They widened and eventually parted, exposing my teeth, top and bottom rows both. I breathed and I could smell the stench of my unwashed mouth, but I could hear the rain. I instead smelled the rain on asphalt. The fresh, the almost stuffy, but so close to stuffy you know it’s releasing and freeing a caged scent into the world and that knowledge will never make me hate the smell of a draughted rain on stone. Never.
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