Raindrops on a Window
A short story about people and where they go
Welcome to your voicemail. You have, 4, new messages and, 2, old messages.
‘Click’
A gruff voice comes on, “son, I just wanted to—”
Message deleted.
“This is the American Red Cross calling to remind you—”
Message deleted.
“Hey, are you coming?” A hint of impatience. “Look, we really need you there. Dad is—”
Message deleted.
“Hi sweetie, I hope you’re doing well.” A pause. “Or, not well, but, oh gosh, I don’t know what—”
Message deleted. Two, old messages.
“Ahem. Uh, son, I… well…” The voice breaks. There is crying on the line. “I can’t— I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” A deep breath. “Your mo—”
Message skipped.
“Woohoo! 10 years! What an accomplishment, honey! Oh, you make us so proud. Whenever we hear about something you do, it’s like a party over here! Wow, wow… wow. You’re so grown up! Ach! It feels like yesterday when you were a baby. Gosh, back then I could look at your eyes and after a moment or two you would look right back and I could just see all of you right in that moment. Everything was right there in front of me. Now, I look at you, and, well, I can’t cradle you like I could then anymore.” A melancholic chuckle. “But, you know, I look at you, I can see there’s so much more now! Ugh, look at me.” Sniffling. “I’m too much. Too much. Make sure you’re spending the right amount of time at the office. I know you can get a little in your head sometimes so be sure that old coot is keeping your feet moving in the right direction. Oh! Before I forget, your cousin from…”
“Have you ever looked at rain on a window?” he asks, tracing the falling droplets with his hand.
“Of course,” I respond, a bit more curtly than I intended.
He takes no notice. Or, at least pretends not to.
“I’m sorry, I believe I misspoke. I’m sure you’ve looked at it, but have you ever seen it? Considered it?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
He waves away my lack of comprehension.
“No matter.” He has not looked my way since our conversation began. “See them now.”
I do my best to comply. The window in my office is dotted with water. The rain has let up somewhat. Rather than water streaming down the glass, errant drops move haltingly down the window. Each speck blurs and distorts the busy city street behind it. Umbrellas dance around one another, jackets brush and bump, and a flurry of pants creates, from the side, an impression of a roiling cloth sea. Nameless, faceless, barely more recognizable than the color of their fabric. A few feet away, entirely alien. Bodies moving, moving, moving. Enough suits and it gives the impression that there is nothing inside them. Cloth husks crawling over each other, over and over and—
“The window.”
I blink. My eyes refocus, and for a moment the street blurs and all I see is a fuzzy blue-brown-gray mass. Just as well. He has been staring at me. Intently enough to see my eyes flick laterally across the street, past the semi-static droplets of rain on the window.
“You’re not looking at the window,” he says.
“Technically-” I stop myself short. He looked older today than usual. His hair wet from his commute, the now slicked-back gray reminded me of my father. They were both men convinced of the value of their years, as if it signified something beyond their muddied frailty. Stern, caring, and above all helpful — the word feels like spittle. The day they stop being useful will be the day they will die, or at least the day they will stop living. They were armored in age and advice, and I was without the correlary armaments. I had seen him walk into the office, same as usual, but when he caught my gaze, a hint of weariness crept into those glaring blue eyes. I hated that softening of his stare, the way I could feel his mind pointed at me like a saber. I could hear his response already: ‘only the young have time for technicalities.’ Technicalities were a game, and he was not sitting with me to to feel youthful or to play games.
“There isn’t much to look at,” I reply, honestly.
He looks at me searchingly, for a moment, before turning back to the window.
“Do you see how the drops move?” he asks.
“Most of them don’t,” I reply.
“Those are not drops. They are trails left behind by droplets which have already made their journey. The drops all move, unless caught in an impossible position by the trails they follow. But no, the drops move. Look at how they move. Some you can barely catch a glimpse of before they’re already finished, flying through their short time on the window, consuming the trail before them and leaving a new one, slightly altered, in their wake.
“Seems nice,” he says, “but there’s not much drama in that.” He looks at me.
I arch an eyebrow. “Drama?” I hear a caustic smirk in my response.
“Yes, boy,” — the word glances off my relative youth — “drama.” A small smile wanders down from his eyes and brushes against his mouth before recoiling.
“Most drops don’t have it so easy as that. Most drops stop, at least for a moment, at some point in their journey down the glass. Look at them” — he points at the glass — “there’s one, right there. And now it moves again.”
“Did you see? It was caught between trails. It paused. It was not dropping. Sometimes, the drops stutter, going between this trail and that, unable to make their way. It almost feels like they’re choosing. ‘What kind of drop am I?’ they ask. The trails don’t have answers; they are answers, left behind by drops who have already chosen. So the drops ask themselves: ‘what kind of drop am I?’ And only they can decide.”
I think I am starting to catch on, and I am not enjoying the feeling.
“What does it matter?” I retort. “They all end up in the same place anyway, just falling down paths laid out for them. It’s not drama, it’s gravity.”
His eyes shoot over to me. “It’s the only thing that could possibly matter. Yes, they follow a path, but the path shifts with their passing. The path becomes part of them, they leave a path of their own. Someday some later drop is changed because of them. Every person has that same great and terrible responsibility, that same question, that same connection. You’re young. You still think you’re mostly you. And perhaps, at your age, that’s a little more true. But it never was and never will be correct. You grow, and people enter and exit your life. You think that just because you can’t see them, they’re gone? That’s only because they are so perfectly within you that it takes an echo — a borrowed tic, a well-worn phrase, a smell — to realize their presence. All anyone important to you has ever been is a trail you followed for a time, a trail made with love, a trail that made you who you are right now. As painful as it is, does that make them more or less present once they go from being out there,” he motions to the space in front of his eyes, “to in here?” he taps his breast.
I feel my chest get warm. My throat tightens. “All those nice words, this big metaphor, and you want me to believe a naked lie? When someone leaves, they’re gone! It’s as simple as that. Your raindrops are on this window alone for an instant, and then are flushed into the sewers. If they are doing anything, they are chasing after traces of connection, hoping beyond hope to join some disgusting flood. Or else they’re just following lines in the sand drawn by some drop they’ll never know, because how could they? Some drop that was just following lines drawn by some other drop, which was just doing the same thing all the way back to that first drop which just slid down the window knowing no one and nothing. That’s your raindrops: they’re alone or they’re nothing. You’re you. I’m me. You’ll leave here and I’ll be alone in my office and that is exactly what it’ll be. Me, alone. You, gone.”
I am standing. I’m not sure when that began. He seems small like this. He sits, his shoulders were rounded with age, like he carries his years on his back, some small portion of which I had seen go by. He had been here before me; I had entered his life, not the other way around. Due to this I had dressed him in a sense of constancy that can never quite fit those younger than you. I had never realized that as I grew, so did he. He looks up at me plaintively.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I really am. This is not my place. But it is someone’s place, and no one else was taking it. Please, please. Sit down again. For my sake.”
With the halting composure of someone warily disengaging from a battle, I find my way back into my seat.
“I ask you to hear me out. Nothing more, nothing less.”
I nod.
“Earlier, you mentioned the drops that don’t move. I said those were not drops. Of course, that’s not completely true. Some of these stationary dots on the window are too big to be mere traces of drops gone by. There are drops that don’t move. They sit there, individuals — perfect individuals, in the most tortuous sense. They take in nothing, leave nothing behind. They don’t stand still because they’ve figured something out; they stand still because they can’t bring themselves to take any of the trails before them. They’re stuck. Look at them. They’ll sit there by themselves, as themselves, for as long as it takes for the sun to come back out and poof” — he motions with his hands — “they return to mist, without ever seeing what the rest of the way down had to offer. Please, just think about what you’re doing. There may be people out there who can survive alone, but no one can live without others.”
A pause.
“Is that all?” I ask, a whisper.
He opens his mouth, closes it without making a sound. We sit for a moment, our words hanging thick in the air and in our bones. He looks at me concerned, then relaxes a little.
“Yes, that’s all.”
He stands slowly, and on his way to the door pats my shoulder. The heavy oak door creaks open and closes with a decisive thud. He leaves behind his thoughts, painting them on the walls and windows and everywhere my eyes touch.
I need to move. Pacing the room, thinking not thoughts but impressions, I feel my way back through everything. I walk to the phone and call my voicemail. It rings. I stare. Frustrated, I throw myself back into pacing just as I hear a ‘click’ and a prerecorded message.
My head is in my hands. I can taste salt. I’m crying. Why? I’m alone, aren’t I? She’s gone, isn’t she? So why can I feel her heartbeat? See her face? Hear her voice?
Outside my window is a blur through the tears. I blink them away. A small boy in a brown wool jacket and a red scarf has spotted me. His lip starts to quiver. I imagine it could be strange, as a child, seeing an adult cry. An adult in a suit, no less. I smile as I wipe away the tears and wave. He is mollified.
He is holding hands with a young man — his father, I suppose. Where are they going? The boy is pulled away. Goodbye, I think to myself, or perhaps to the boy. They must be going somewhere. I look at my watch. Ah, I could still make it.
I take another step towards the window and look up. I see uncountable raindrops fall, slicing through the air, following each other to the ground. When they reach the ground, they become nothing at all. There was no way around it. A journey, sure, but each time with the most terrible, most nothingest ending. There was no way to dress it up, no way to remain whole. A raindrop hits the window above me. It dribbles down the glass for a moment, then stops, caught in itself.
They’ve delayed the funeral for me. Several times now. It was now months since she… left us. She needs to rest, they said. We need her to rest, they said. Rest? that’s a funny word for placing someone six feet out of reach. Cover them in dirt, stone, and pretty words; it just puts them further away. There is no dignity in the ground. At some point I had begun staring at my reflection. My mother’s eyes, they said. But I could only see out through my own. Mine never got that funny sparkle which could take hers over in the instant before she told you someone else’s secret. I never had her eyes, just a shallow impression of them.
Right outside, individuals breaking the surface of my vision for an instant before being swallowed back into their worlds, far out of my sight. Each one to their own destination. Walking, searching with their own eyes. Perhaps one of them had eyes like my mother’s. Perhaps. As they walk, they blend and twist into one another, a watch from one matching the sleeve of another, an umbrella breaking the rain’s path to three businessmen who have never and will never exchange a word. Lives mixing and then separating, somehow each of them making the others more real. For a beautiful instant I could skim the impression that this was not a blur, but a kaleidoscope, recombining always, each piece with their own eyes but matching gaits. It was only for a moment, but I could feel that each piece of the moment was so colorfully and unbelievably its own, that I could not help but love them all. It was only for a moment, but I could feel the world under my feet. It was only for a moment, but isn’t everything?
My door slams open. “I got you the—” Lanky, a bit awkward with his height, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with all of it, and not a wrinkle on his face. He seems new. He probably mistook my door for one of the other dozen like it.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought— I mean I went— This is your—”
I smile and wave away his various confessions. “It’s alright. Helpful, even. I was just leaving.”
Somehow, the door looks also anxious as he holds it. I take my jacket and umbrella. Navy to a funeral. I can hear her now. She never would have stood for it. Oh well. There are people expecting me — how lovely a thought. My heart is in so many places at once, not because it is torn but because it is aflight. With my mother, with my family, with the young man kindly waiting for me to leave my office. How wonderful it all is! I turn before leaving and tap the window. The suspended raindrop recoils, moves sharply to the left, and begins its slide downwards.
I walk outside, hearing the rain pitter-patter off my umbrella, watching streams of water and people move through the streets. The euphoria which had gripped me so tightly begins to fade. I wish it well. Like rain on a window, he says. I feel something in me move which I didn’t realize had stopped. I had been myself long enough; it was time to start living again.
Thank you for bearing with me on this short, perhaps unwise excursion into fiction. This ‘bonus’ post may be the type of thing I try to pencil in between the larger monthly posts going forward. The monthly posts will have the same general essay-like structure, but these posts will be a bit more all-over-the-place. One might be fiction, another might be a link list, a third might be a short musing based on something I’ve read or seen. And so on. We will be back in mid-November with our regularly scheduled programming.