rain

Yesterday evening, it began to thunder and to rain very hard. The sky was completely overcast and silver, and for a long time charged with the idea of rain, with the thought of moisture. The light gathered into itself and settled on the contours of buildings and the leaves of trees, making everything glow in a surreal way. Finally, the rain began, all at once, horizontal from sky to earth, white and silver streaks. The light in the sky danced from shadow to glow and shapes became hazy in the gauze of rain. I was sitting on the bed inside beside you. You were lying down with your head on a curled up cushion. The rain made me cool and made me want to lie down next to you, so I did. For a long time, I lay there, looking out through half-closed eyes, through the almost invisible black lines of the screen over the doorframe, looking out at the steady streaks and sheets and lines of silver.

Sagwan

Outside my balcony, there is a sagwan tree (Tectona Grandis/ Teak). Its foliage is large and disorganized, spreading out with a unique messy happiness. The trunk of the tree is not very broad, which makes the tree's foliage appear all the more oversized and bizarre. Something about the weight and structure of the tree makes it conducive to catching and responding to breezes, even the smallest ones. The leaves, individually, are very large, the oldest measuring several feet in length and breadth, and oddly wavy along the sides. They create fantastic negative spaces. I love watching this tree at sunset.

The wood of the teak is dense and hard and so expensive. A few months ago, another teak, a younger one, that stood next to the one I just described, fell mysteriously at night. Its fallen foliage was a jungle in itself, one into which the dogs loved to disappear. But then the tree was chopped up and sold. The next morning there was a strange empty space, a portion of the sky that I hadn't seen in years.

waiting for the rain

Yesterday, I saw the most beautiful sight. A solitary cumulus cloud was drifting far above the horizon across my line of vision and the only bit of open sky left to be enjoyed from my balcony. It was lit by an internal light that grew stronger and faded at different times, as though a gigantic firefly was trapped within it. Now and then, a sharp and slender streak of lightning would course through one part of its vaporous body, then another. This cloud moved slowly along my line of vision, carrying its brilliant bolts of lightning, through a sky that was a watercolour gray-blue and deepening before my very eyes. The cool air stirred and I wondered when the rain that this cumulus was heralding, would begin.

Monumental Love

I thought of it as repairing a monument, as patching its walls section by section, standing precariously on a bamboo frame but catching the breeze nonetheless, suspended between the far ground where humans moved like clockwork toys and the very top of the monument, which in turn pierced the blue sky...

When I thought of it like this, I didn't feel so bad about you.