prompt: rain, title: may flowers in misc. flash fiction

Necessary errands of some kind or another drag you out into the world, near the beginning of the end of some terrible thing that’s nowhere near over but just close enough to an ending where you know the masses are about to get stupid about it far too early. Maybe some contested election or world-wide pandemic, maybe far something simpler and more predictably cyclic, like the end of a long and ugly winter. Maybe there’ll be riots in the streets, maybe there’ll be people coughing on each other to prove some kind of idiot point. Maybe they’ll just start driving like black ice no longer exists and ram their needlessly-large pick-up trucks into every single yield sign there is.

Disaster will come as timely and inevitable as the tides but you will never ever see the form it takes coming. There is something broken in the human psyche where we think that following through on the confident performatively foolish is the best way to project illusions of strength, doubly-broken in that we often believe it. It leaves us as a species unpredictably predictable.

Nevertheless, you drive and nonetheless it is the first beautiful day in forever and so you drive, drive further than you needed to, just to experience that day. Your automotive perambulations push you past the skeletons of long-abandoned above-ground vinyl swimming pools, push you past the bodegas and dollar stores where once your childhood pizzerias stood, push you past a car-struck possum by the roadside awaiting nature’s cruel reclamation. So much has happened while the world lay fallow beneath blankets of suffocating snow and fear. So many once good things have rotted away. And yet.

And yet you also pass a gaggle of teenagers on your left, tentatively setting up a giant trampoline where they will soon leap in pursuit of that glorious newborn sun. And yet there is another pizza shop under construction across town, where the next generation might make their own memories. And yet in your rearview mirror, there are new green buds on trees you had feared this particular winter had finally killed outright and for good. At yet,

Rain will fall from the skies, then evaporate and slowly rise, again and again and again. That’s how those new buds got their water. That’s how the whole thing renews. Your life will go on
until someday it doesn’t, but life will go on far longer than that, and that should not be news.

Everyone’s April is someone else’s October. Every cycle you go through is someone else’s cycle born anew and you are both the tiniest blips in some other greater cycle, the both of you. And it is terrible. And it is beautiful. It is beautifully terrible and it is terribly beautiful. And yet.

While it is still your turn to jump, take in as much as you can of that trampoline sun. Just don’t jump so high you break something or someone. Embrace the day, there’ll come a time it’s done.