It's a heavy rain tonight, here in New York. I sit at my computer in the bedroom that used to be my sister's, and then my brother's, and is now, for a week, mine, and listen to the rain pelting the grass outside the window.
I got here on Wednesday night. My father picked me up at JFK and we drove up to Beacon without event. No one else was awake when we arrived, at nearly one a.m., and I came into this room and unpacked my backpag into the nightstand drawers and set up my laptop. There was some issue with connecting to the internet, which my dad and I spent about half an hour troubleshooting, and once that was fixed, I thought I'd go to bed but I didn't, watching television shows on my computer until almost four.
The rain sounds different. There used to be a woods, a seemingly endless expanse of trees, living, dying, and dead, just a few feet outside this window. The woods are gone. The trees are gone. The rain is not impeded in its fall, smacking the earth.
I woke up at nine on Thursday to the sound of drilling, almost like jackhammering, from the construction site next door, the housing complex they're building over what used to be the woods. It was raining that day, too, a different kind of rain, an unrelenting drizzle sometimes fading into a mist. I wanted to go out and take pictures but the rain never stopped, and the drilling never stopped, shaking the house and invading my skull. I lay on the bed and listen to the sound of it, and the sound of my mother surfing through her tivo menu, trying at times to watch more television. The drilling stopped at around four and I napped. The rest of the day drifted away, fading into mist, and I went to bed much earlier.
Lightning illuminates the few trees that stand, still, outside the window. I never see lightning where I live now and I'm reminded how I am inexplicably petrified of it. I have some memories of storms as a child, so scared, and my sister could not comfort me, her logic no match for my fear.
Friday began with more drilling. I really thought I might lose my mind. My mother called my brother, who had the day off, and I together to discuss the day's plans. She wanted to maybe do a short nature walk and then go shopping in Poughkeepsie, mostly for me, and then meet my father for dinner somewhere. My brother and I had planned to see a movie and he was displeased that the whole rest of his day had been planned for him, and displeased that his only other option was to not go with us and be stranded here without his car. He was a bit snippy about it and my mother said "Forget it," and stormed into her room. I stayed and talked with him out in the dining room, away from the drilling, and eventually he went to apologize to her.
It's probably narcissistic to think lightning would bother to strike me, out of a literally infinite set of possible coordinates, why would it ever choose me? And yet, I'm afraid, and yet, I'm tempted to run into the rain and let it cover me, taking my chances.
The plan changed. No shopping. We would go to Madam Brett park in Beacon and then go meet my father for dinner and then Noel and I could go to a movie separately later. Made sense. "I'm too accomodating," my mother said to me later. We drove to the park and my mother talked while my brother played his music so loud that I had to lean forward and strain to hear what she was saying, as she told us of misadventures she and my father had had the week before in Belgium. Then we walked, on a sunny and surprisingly hot afternoon, through the winding paths of this nature park, my brother always twenty feet ahead of my mother and I, and me always hanging back to make sure my mother was making out okay. We avoided hills and had to stop a few times. It seemed like Noel was there by himself, shooting rubberbands into the sky. At the waterfall, it seemed as if we were all there by ourselves, for a moment, as my brother went somewhere my mother couldn't go, and I ended up somewhere in between them, the compromise. Then we got into the car and headed north. We were meeting my father at 4:30, or thats what we thought the plan was, but a few minutes before 4:30 my mother was unable to reach my dad by phone to tell him we were nearing the restaurant so we stopped at Barnes & Noble to wait for his call. Outside the store I put on my headphones and smoked a cigarettte, waiting, as I usually do.
I try to forget the rain as I try to forget where I am. I did live in this room once, the summer of 1992, possibly the best summer of my life. But mostly I lived in the other room, where Noel is now, and I lived there with him and without him, from 1975 to 1997. This was my sister's room and I spent a lot of time in here as a child, looking over the books in her bookshelf, never reading any of them, while she stayed on her bed and read, always reading, and me, always waiting.
Dinner was fun. My parents talked more about Belgium. My mother asked me if I was an atheist and I said not quite, maybe an atheiette. Noel scared away a table of senoir citizens that was about to be seated next to us. He used the phrase "nice rack" as if an insult. I pretended that they moved because they overheard I was gay. I asked Noel to explain crypto-solipsism and I'm still kind of waiting for his explanation to make sense. The food was not particularly good, except for the fries, but there are moments when my family's dynamics makes me think, "I should be writing this all down," they're so crazy and funny, but I never do write it down, and those moments are unfortunately not as frequent as I might hope.
When I'm in Noel's room it's hard to remember that I lived there for twenty-two years, even though some of the same furniture remains. Well, one piece of furniture, the dresser that used to be mine. I don't want to remember. I don't want to remember who that person was. It's not me.
Noel and I drove home together after dinner, and realized we'd have to head back out immediately to catch the single showing of the movie we'd decided to see. My parents were at the grocery store, so I called my mother to tell her we'd be gone by the time they got back. I enjoyed the movie, and enjoyed seeing it with my brother. I don't see many movies so it means something to me, and this movie was an adaptation of a comic we'd both read, a book Noel had turned me on to a few years earlier. Afterwards we were tasked with going to Walmart to pick up medicine for our niece, who would be arriving in a few hours, and we never managed to find the right drug, but we didn't end up with an armload of junk food. I stayed uo much too late and I don't even know what I was doing.
I really do think I've become a different person but I haven't. Everything that I am now is an extension of, or reaction against, the boy I was then, here, in this place. The house has changed, stifled under suffocating layers of useless clutter, and the woods are gone from our windows, replaced by prefabricated housing units, and our bodies have all changed, heavier, slower, but in some way it's all still the same. I won't ecape it, and everyone I stand, memories shower me like the rain.
Today I woke to the sound of children in the house. My sister had arrived in the middle of the night, with three of her four children. Her husband stayed back in Baltimore with the oldest son. It was only the third time I've ever met my youngest niece, and I expected she would not remember me, but she did. I'm used to my nieces and nephews being shy around me but she was not. It made me happy. Later we all went to my grandmother's, minus Noel, who was at work. That was nice, uneventful. Then I went out, to go shopping, with my mother, my sister, and my oldest niece. It was a long day. We drove up to Poughkeepsie and right as we arrived at the mall, my mother realized that she'd forgotten her wallet and we had to drive right back to get it, a twenty minute drive on a good day but much longer in Saturday afternoon traffic. I was glad to spend time with them, as I never get to spend much time with Alara or Sarah, but I'm not sure that driving, driving, shopping, driving, shopping, shopping and more driving was necessarily the best framework. We got home much later than expected, with the plan that we'd order chinese food for everyone, except Noel had just gone out to get food for himself. We called but he ddn't answer, and when he got back, from Wendy's it turned out, he was in a very bad mood. He snapped at Sarah who'd been so excited to see him, angry that we'd taken so long, his blood sugar low. I retreated to my room for my dinner. Later I'd go out, to the kitchen, and clean. Just the dishes, the stove, and one counter, but enough to make a difference, enough to illuminate how absurd the rest of the kitchen is in its clutter. I felt good but then I got an email from someone who is essentially a stranger telling me things I didn't want to know about my ex-boyfriend. I found myself on the bed, on this strange lumpy bed, listening to the rain. Saturday night and there's no one to call.
I can't escape the remembering. This feeling of constantly chasing after something I could never catch. The heaviness of the secret I harbored for much too long. The heaviness. I want to be light, but there's never enough sun here, and free, but I'm encumbered with unwanted memory. I want to be weightless and without care, but I am heavy and always plunge to earth, like the rain, as always.
