Being warm and dry is such a blessing. Literally and mentally. All those times caught in the rain on public transportation. Like clockwork, rain would pour down on the way to or on the way from a Monday morning therapy appointment, sometimes both. I started to believe the rain was just for me, just for my therapy appointments so I could be degraded in the process of finding out why my life had become so empty and static.
Once my therapist offered to drop me at the train station after an appointment when the rain was so heavy that only a nanosecond under it soaked me to the bone. I thanked her, but refused, knowing I didn’t want to travel with the one person who knew my insides. When she immediately said okay without a moment of hesitation, I was glad I didn’t say yes and take her up on an offer that seemed, when she quickly responded, more an act of courtesy rather than an intentional act of providing solace. And she was already doing enough. I was paying her, yes, but she and any therapist should be allowed to walk out the door unencumbered after sifting through a mess that probably projects more of their own lives than they’d be willing to admit.
It’s like my quest to leave the practice room in the practice room–her ability to leave garbage in the trash can. Not my garbage, not me as garbage, but the muck and mud of life itself.
When I step voluntarily in the rain now to smoke a cigarette, the few and far between moments of coping, I also sense my voluntary exposure to what broke me in the process of trying to put my shards back together. Those moments remind me of how I can self-sabotage, erecting a memory that in actuality is a normal part of existence–being caught in the rain–but reeks of a time so low for me. It’s the feeling of being discarded and left not for dead, but for a life of deadness encompassing a breath of fresh pollution rather than air.
And the mental warmth, the mental dryness of being alive nurtured by the rainwater of a shower rather than a flooding of rainwater that drowns me: it isn’t so figurative after all. Being warm and dry in my physical body mirrors, recently unbeknownst to me, a dry warmth in my mind.
Being warm and dry is such a blessing.
Look: Evolve 