Mundanity

It’s been raining on and off since around 7 PM tonight. It stormed briefly, but I was inside. I could feel the thunder as it rippled through the building and my bones echoed the pounding of the rain against stone but I was inside a shell of a building prone to blackouts during heavy thunderstorm. Inside, there was another storm building, without any rain or lightning just rumbles of thunder in an overcast sky that never seem to stop as people try and ease into what is the new normal as everyone fears the spread of pandemic while fearing the cinch of a loose waist even more. It is a frustrating balancing act that leaves everyone unsatisfied and sends a hum of tension through the air as we all teeter on the edge of pitching ourselves down the company issued staircase every single day.

I left work to go to a friend’s place, forty minutes late as I closed up the facilities long after when those who worked in it should have been finished but weren’t. The rain had eased up and the day-shy of being full moon existed as a haze in the sky, reflecting off the imperfectly beautiful asphalt, the steaming heat of the day offset by the steaming afterthought of rain. The scent that filled the air was unburdened and clean in a way that only rain seems to bring. Driving the ten miles away, I took mainly back roads and spent a long time with the windows down, reveling in the cold air, with a broken radio and headphones jammed into my ears so I could sing along with skip skip skip skip skip skip skip skip “Wasteland Baby” by Hozier. The car I was following was going fifteen over the speed limit and I was keeping pace, through the twisting roads and slick stone.

Pulling into the parking lot of my friend’s apartment building, I continued to belt along to “Wait For It” from the hit musical Hamilton as I left my face mask in the car alongside the trash from my last visit to Taco Bell. Once inside, I mixed a white Russian for my friend and I as I recounted the various political obstacles I had either been leaping over or barreling at work as circumstance dictated. Rejoining them in the living room, I got underneath their weighted blanket with my drink as they continued to paint a sign for a protest that weekend, painstakingly going over the detailing for each individual letter.

“By the way, I got this for you while I was doing some printing at work!” they told me, intentionally holding the oversized piece of paper in a way that blocked my view. After begging and pleading, they turned it around to reveal a bespoke poster of my favorite cryptid with a short blurb about him. I thanked them profusely before turning on one of our favorite rewatches: Criminal Minds.

I watched tensely as agents of the federal government flat out stated that they were using intimidation tactics to force an individual to speak with them by stalking him and photographing the comings and going of the individual and any guests to his house. My friend left the letters to dry before showing off the baking sheet they had also painted to carry in a few days.

We sat for hours, watching people who were good at hunting down the bad guys hunt them down as I critiqued their special effects and tried to guess what recipe they had used to create the fake blood we were seeing. At the end of the night, I got back into my car and took a different set of winding backroads between five and twenty five miles over the speed limit. I had no reason to worry though, despite the slick nature of the asphalt, I had driven down these roads countless times in worse conditions and knew for a fact that there was nowhere that anyone who could stop me from speeding could be hiding.

I was a few minutes from home when I passed by the beginning to road construction. With completely wet asphalt, and no one and nothing to light the road beyond my headlights, the unnatural orange of the safety sign struck me as I drove past. It reminded me of the pictures of sunsets over an ocean, with a perfect trail of light away from the center of the sun as it sunk below the horizon. It reminded me of melted ice cream in a summer’s heat. It reminded me of something beautiful in a normal world.

When I got home, I said hello to my cat and wanted to write about that sign. I wanted to capture in my memory the way that it struck me in an unexpected way, how it leapt out to remind me of the existence of other humans when I was utterly alone. There was no reason I should have found it to stir my heart the way that it did, the way it seemed to emulate the moon and the way she reflects off the ground in a way so much closer to home and so near to the heart in a way a celestial body never could be.

It had been a long day. And to see that something was being worked on, that was remarkable in and of itself.