I’ve never seen rain indoors, so it seems a little redundant to say ‘outside it is raining’. Anyway, it is and I’m watching two female cyclists ready themselves to brave it. Awfully cold rain too. Winter rain in May, it makes the heart sink. For all of thirty seconds my heart is a lead weight at a depth that makes the rest of my body ache. And then…
And then I am okay again. I remember that rain has its uses. A worse place is a place without it. I think about green shoots and all that other nourished, cliche, crap that relies on steady rainfall. And then…
And then I look about and notice that this cafe is full of people. All pressed in here, filling tables and even the avenues between them, all escaping together into a communion of coffee and cake. I always love the hum of a full house. The commotion all around me fills my humanity to the brim. All of us collected, intimate and close and warm together.
So outside it is raining and inside the force of life is flooding the ventricles. The awning is a techno synth remix of lakes in Scotland, rockpools in Cornwall, even of puddles in Abergaveny.
They say the heart has its own memory. I say that feelings are the sheet music of the soul. The walls of our hearts scrawled with it; and wrapping it up like a butchers cut in wax paper. Maybe the mind recalls, but the heart has a playback function.
