Wednesday 8/7/24
Every day, I start work at an hour most would consider very early. Some days, I start the day before. In between writing at the desk in these early hours, I periodically step out into the hallway to do push-ups and planks. The heat that had been holding the city in its sweaty embrace finally broke away yesterday, and I even had a flannel on in the cooler weather. It’s cool and raining this morning, and I can see the rain in the streetlight which is still on outside.
That’s fitting, as I’m finishing a ghost story called "If Storm It Was" which is about someone up at three in the morning, listening to the rain that’s centered on a single window in their home, where the shade is down and where a now-soundless family of birds has a nest. But it’s not just the rain the person is hearing—it’s a god bailing water from its ship in the street on account of the hull being breached in some mysterious, foreign sea, and this is the cove into which the god has pulled for repairs.
The narrator is too frightened to look from out behind the shade, because the rain isn’t failing against any of the other windows, and he or she thinks this might be the world ending. The sound of the bailing water is in some form of communication with the door in its jamb, but the narrator can’t decipher their language. And it’s also about the passing of time, language's existence before there were people, weather we remember, weather we don't, and why, life, death, and ultimately life's meaning. If you had walked past my door this morning, you would have perhaps heard me laughing, which I've been doing a lot of as I read back these words, thinking, "Come on! How does anyone do this? You have to be kidding me!"
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