I woke up early to the rain today. There is no better feeling. To wake up and hear the rain’s pitapat and lie in bed and think about being alive. You just lay and tell yourself, “I am alive,” repeatedly. We are much too forgetful. We should repeat things more often. The tiny fleck of pale light peered from behind the curtains and made silhouettes out of everything in the room. I lay still, watching the curtain move back and forth softly for a while. There are moments in between busy weeks where all things halt. It was a moment just like that: everything lay still, and so did I.
A shiver spread through the air, telling me the rain grew ferocious outside. I got up and out of bed and pulled the curtains wide open. “I am alive,” I whispered. Smiling, I decided to start the day with the highest of spirits. I thought of the rains from last year; I thought of you, but then, I scoffed at how little I have thought of you these past months. And not to cause a scene in this quiescent air, I discarded your name like old, tattered clothes.
I do not wear your name like a badge anymore. I am not sorry about this; if anything, I am proud of managing to dig myself out of an early grave. When love asks you to dig a hole, you break the ground and dig it with an incomparable measure of detail. When it is finished, and they ask you to jump into it and lie there forever, you quietly comply. “It is love that asks for this,” you tell yourself, “there may be a reason after all.”
It was a day like this one, for I remember rain washing the dirt away: I managed to get out. At that moment, I realised I couldn’t let my love for you suffocate me. I was surrounded by fresh air, but I was still gasping. I walked out of the makeshift grave of my own design. I was alive, and there was still time. Of time, there is plenty, even in weeks as busy as these.
There is time to walk and to laugh. There is time to work and to write and to read. There is time to do everything I want and then some more. As long as we are alive, there is always time.
If there’s one thing I know, if there’s anything I know at all, it’s this:
I am alive.