collecting rain
Of course you can’t be unhappy for a whole month at a time, not without pauses. I felt less dreary this last week, only annoyed at the clouds that have been almost perpetual. But it’s been like Martin and I are both waiting for a change; in the evenings we’ve usually stayed at home; Martin reads philosophy and I paint, or we drink tea and hardly speak. I’ve been trying to paint bright things, Moroccan oranges, port cities, forsythia, Chinatown– but I never finish. Most nights it rains, and we wait quietly, collecting rain on the windows.
Yesterday evening, though, we discussed this state of affairs, and decided we had to go out. It was raining pretty hard, and we didn’t go far, but on the way back, I felt better, more immediate. “When the snow comes,” said Martin, “we’ll find an appropriate way to celebrate.” That helped; I love when we celebrate things. “When the snow comes,” I said, “I will wear nothing but red.” We haven’t wrapped ourselves back up in silence since then. My sense of expectation is coming back, like marking of calendar days with red X’s.