Not praying, no. This is just wanting. And waiting.
Pray for rain under slate skies. Pray for rain as you scream it isn’t fair into the empty car—not for yourself to hear, not for the world to hear, not for anything or anyone to listen to or acknowledge—in a desperate and childish rebellion, raging against the sudden, unexpected helplessness that you awoke with, out of phase again with the world.
Pray for rain in the sickly heat of yellow skies and yellowing leaves—it isn’t fair—driving home in a morning that still feels like yesterday. Your clothes smell like him. Why does that make you uneasy?
Pray for rain while you crawl on torn knees over fields of gravel, while you tear fingernails from their beds, while on piles of rock you splinter bone into a million needles pushing up through sagging skin, while you raise your head back and toss it forwards again on the curb to grind teeth against concrete and asphalt—it isn’t fair—until your body is nothing more than a mangled mound of loose skin and shattered bone.
Pray for rain because you don’t know what else to do. Because a void opened inside you. Because it isn’t fair. Because there is nothing more than fleeting comfort in the pressure of a calloused palm over your mouth, choking back either tears or moans; because this fading season is out of phase with the rest of time, change forcing itself unwillingly and too early inside the raw and gaping wounds of these desiccated hills; because even destroying yourself would never be enough, could never be the right ending, is shameful to look at and be consumed by even though it only skitters across your mind in the barest of moments and is forgotten just as quickly. Because there is more than one way to destroy and rebuild yourself.
Pray for rain because you can’t figure out how much of what you write and remember is a lie, and how much is truth; and you’re too tired to care anyway.
Pray for rain because it finally begins to fall in the anxious blue-grey of evening, pattering contentedly on the windshield and roof, washing away the suffocating film that has accumulated on the surface of this day.
Conflicted, but better. Cleaner, somehow. Fresher. Alive.
Northern Loss 