Read Clearly Now, the Rain for Free Online Page A

sits at a sidewalk café. A smattering of strangers populates the tables, everyone arranged so that everyone else has the maximum of space around them, all angled toward the finale of a bright spring day. Serala has her sunglasses and her cigarette smoke and her woolen coat with the floppy collar, so she feels cozy, hidden even in plain sight. A French version of Camus’s
The Stranger
lies open next to her diary, which holds waterfalls of her blue letters. As the tangerine light grows richer, she loosens her scarf and she’s suddenly hit by an image of me, facing the same horizon and dreaming of our reunion, and she almost smiles thinking of how many long meals and poems and road trips we have yet to share. She feels excited even, ready to return. And as her cigarette burns down and the day starts fading like it’s on a dimmer switch, the faces of all the people that she loves spin through her head. And the remaining bar of sun goes out like a wick in pooling wax, she stubs out the smoke and, for the first time in her life, a few tears arrive without pain.
    When I picture the towheaded boy, just barely clear of teenagedom, dressed in a weak attempt at Mérida’s formality, hunched over a tiny circular café table, filling his veins with caffeine and beer as liquid midwives to his words, I chuckle. The melodrama of my and Serala’s “imaginary lunches” is sweet and nostalgic—the fetish of poetry and romance of handwritten pages, wielded like weapons or lightning rods. But I’m glad of that overly earnest kid, that terrible writer, not only because my commitment to Serala caused me to record my experience and make it real to myself, but because it fused us closer. I didn’t know when I made the vow to meet her on the page that it was the only way I’d really know her; at the time it was consolation for not being in her presence for many long months. I know now that if I hadn’t sent her my fuzzy truths, I would not have received her stark ones and might never have had another chance to prove I was brave enough to hear.
    I had a burning need for her to hear me and understand me as I bumbled through that other world like a drunk alien. This need isolated the other lessons just enough that I could absorb them. For one, I was receiving the lesson of solitude. I had no one in Mérida aside from my straight-backed Catholic household and three female Sage Hill students I saw infrequently; no one spoke English and no one was going out of their way to incorporate some blond yanqui into the brilliant weave of that culture, as I had hoped and dreamed among my pre-journey jitters. My life had always been attended by a best friend, a girlfriend, or both—not to mention a broad social circle. The lonesomeness of the first weeks was terrifying in itself. The fact of being strange in addition to solo brought me to tears at night in the shadow of an avocado tree; I wanted to snap the neck of our rooster myself when he sang down the day at dawn and announced another cycle of heartsickness. But because I had to articulate this to Serala, I had to wait for her response. And so I had to hear her gentle admonitions to suck it the fuck up and embrace the challenge of anonymity and silence, which eventually taught me more than any person has.
    I didn’t know then why the violent death of that pedestrian was the loneliest moment of the semester, but I do now: I had just seen a body for the first time, a grotesquely destroyed body at that. Everyone around me had reacted with meager curiosity. I, on the other hand, had been hypnotized for only the briefest moment—and then horrified by my own interest. My life—with a handful of exceptions—had been sheltered from violence. The flurry of punches I’d received and given, the infrequent streak of bloody bodies in a house party or the slashed face of a drunk on the streets of Seattle composed my limited kaleidoscope of