Tonight the first fall of rain knocked against my window with the fingertips of an old wish. Each falling droplet rapped upon the glass barrier with dripping desire. From a downpour of dream answering symphonies, they knocked more than the average beggar would, yearning for me to open that door again. To turn the door knob, sealing my frozen little heart, and do something I swore off forever. But whispering of a bone-chilling heartbreak, they fractured atop glossy concrete coaxing me to unsheath my heart from its locked little pocket and unleash the hopeless romantic from the caged veins and promises. They breathed uncertainty and a strange familiarity to last fall when I went hitting the ground beside them. And though with untied promises, they knocked and knocked, knowing that hopeless romantic chained and shackled in the depths of me yearned for them. That the prisoner, hidden from daylight and desire, would tear free at the sound of their awakening. That in the cell of darkness and spilled blood where she bled herself dry, there was still a fizzing hope that someday she’d dance in the rain again. And so, like a drugging spell, the sounds of the rapping rain uncoiled every ounce of fear within that captive, erasing each thought of the past. Every drip and splat and crash and fracture seemed to be a line of stimulants in her bloodstream, animating her life back together with stitches of only sounds and reconstructing hope.
The bars of veins were cold as ice just as the visiting rain, yet only a plaguing mockering against her fingers while she shook them with her pleas. She craved just one dance in the rain holding her lover’s hands, frozen together from midnight tears. Just one kiss while her wet hair cements against her face from the earth’s tears rather than her own. She’d spend the rest of the night shaking and shivering at the touch of those bars just in case they’d break. Just in case she’d be free to watch those droplets drip from your eyelashes while you stare at her beneath the silver pour of the moon. But I, the jailer holding the key to the bars and those shackles, just closed my eyes and hoped the rain would fade away, just like my own heart had done once. Just hoped I could handle a night of pleading rain and praying prisoners so maybe I wouldn’t fade away again. Though, in the darkness of my room, the little glow from that hopeless romantic coming back to light kept me much more awake than my own fear of her escape. That hopeless romantic, a begging sister to the rain, almost started a fire in my heart and veins of cold, cold ice. And I almost let her out. Almost let her burn the world to dust and ashes in the wake of her hopeless dreams.
