Read Clearly Now, the Rain for Free Online

and Company, crossing the bridge to the busier side of the city. The way the brown river is flowing—
dirty but fucking pretty
she thinks—it calls her to pause on the bridge. One of her favorites is coming through the headphones now, either “Drunken Angel” or “Jackson,” maybe. And as she lights a Pall Mall, and the drizzle picks up, and the two waters mingle, their clarity and their dirt, as waiters hustle to crowd chairs under umbrellas, as the booksellers bang closed their kiosks for the night, and it all seems to happen in time with Lucinda Williams, Serala thinks that maybe, just maybe, this might be enough. And she’s shocked to see the swollen lip of the sun peek out for a moment before day is done, but not as shocked as she is to find herself standing there in the rain smiling at it.
    The night seems thicker than when she entered the bar. She removes her shades with reluctance, remembering Allen Ginsberg’s warning:
It is uncool to wear sunglasses at night, unless, of course, you should be wearing sunglasses at night, in which case, you know, it is uncool to take them off
. The stir of shadows around the bus stop seems heavier. Gin burns in her, roiling the gastric juices in her stomach, which has shrunken into a negative space since the last time she choked down a meal with her aloof host mother. The bus is half-empty and she lurches aboard, grabs a pole, and steps away from the man who already stabs her with his eyes. She puts her shades back on, faces away, but he sidles up, says something lewd in French that she can’t make out.
Fuck you
, she tells him and he laughs like a gunshot and grabs between her legs, hard, chattering on, something about brown girls. And then he knows what’s happened before Serala does, reeling from her jab, his lip hanging raggedly open, blinking stupidly, dripping blood on the expensive shoes of commuters. Her hand hurts but she doesn’t care and she stumbles off the bus onto a corner where a café spills generous light. And at her back she knows that strangers witness her as scrappy and tough, that heads in the bus window turn with respect for her. And she’s pleased in a way, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that now she wants to cry and be held as anyone, weaker or stronger, would. But there is no one for this and instead she’s off at a trot down another ancient street, searching for the black door where she will find what she needs. Where she will find the thing that can do the trick that gin cannot, will ease the aches in her spine, will let her sleep maybe even until tomorrow, will make her feel better than held, better than loved, better than rested—even if she has to go away from herself for a while to get it.
    One afternoon in Mérida I sat at a sidewalk café that resembled a French café—one could order café au lait and wine, though I stuck with hard coffee and beer. There was an old waiter who chain-smoked, and well-dressed citizens with newspapers; umbrellas were placed to shield us from the mountains’ sudden storms. It was that day I wrote a line I recall clearly, seared into my memory by its flagrant naïveté. It went like this, in response to Serala’s self-destructive revelations from Paris:
I would love you no matter what, even if you told me you were going to take all your pills and go play on some French freeway.
    I went away for seven weeks to the northern Caribbean coast, leaving behind most of the telephone and postal service. She hit the rails of Europe with her friend Cassie and had a blast, recalling the
I wonders
and the
maybes
and the
ifs
. In the end it seemed like maybe France was a wash: a lot of unhealthiness, trouble from piggish men, and a lot of loneliness, but also proof of strength, some moments of possibility. The lesson: she
did
miss—and
did
have—the love of many good people oceans away.
    I like to imagine it as a single moment:
    She