the OKness of sadness

There are infinite reasons that underwrite legitimate sadness, and we need not run the gamut from melancholia to anhedonia to ascribe some type of logic to the idea that there are times when it feels good – like you’ve become a fucking person again – to just sit there and wallow in how bad it feels to be you at that particular moment. I can’t say this is that particular moment; I’m just reflective about an upcoming westerly trip and the semblance of normalcy that will greet me upon my arrival. Normalcy is a specter, I’ve come to realize, and you only glimpse it in rare moments when you return to something that was familiar when you left it and hasn’t yet asserted its changed status to you. I look forward to the fifteen seconds, minutes, or days of normalcy I will have before I notice that just because I wasn’t around, doesn’t mean everything up and stopped. But I digress.

*****
It is a strange time. Heat lightning pulsates on a nightly basis in my particular geographical milieu, and with it comes sheets of rain. The basic dynamism of August thunderstorms and the psychic imprint of awe that they left on me as a young child makes it hard to sleep out of sheer excitement that rain has come. I woke up one morning some ten days ago and walked through the uncannily “movie set suburbia” neighborhood to kind of like right my senses after a strange confrontational night that had ended, oh, two and a half hours before I woke up. A mile away from the house, I heard the first rumble of thunder and knew I was in for a soaking. It came quickly – I walked slowly as a kind of counterpoint – and somewhere in the interval of turning around and opening the garage door I thought of five or six random people I haven’t seen in some time and may never see again. There’s something about being absent from the lives of people you genuinely care about that almost makes you want to believe in heaven, isn’t there? That last ten yards of walking up the driveway was sad, but the lucidity of the moment, the crispness of the feeling, coalesced with the sadness in a way that made the idea of actually continuing with the morning – smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee and reading that book that’s sat at the bottom of the pile for six months – somehow more than just bearable. That book, by the way, was worth reading.

*****
I had a younger cousin once who expressed surprise that we humans don’t melt when it rains. I’m not sure what he thought we were like, but thinking about that makes it clear abandoning the ambitious post I had conjured up around this topic is the right thing to do. Tomorrow I drive. And think.