thawing

It is a dark and storming night as we walk out of the building, our shopping bags swinging to hit the back of our knees with every stride. We walk forward, careless of anything else we should be doing, not thinking of life at school. We hope that all the drama in our minds won't muddy the clear night with circulating thoughts. We hope the clouds in the sky will give us a good dousing of much needed rain. A little washing of our souls tonight.

We deposit the groceries in the back of the car as the sheet-lightning ignites the sky like a flash of a camera in a dark room. The clouds and the cars are illuminated in the lavender blackness of the night. We walk across the parking lot together, peels of laughter mixing with the wind as we eat from the pack of mint oreos just bought. The air is heady with the sweet smell of melting earth. We are all becoming a little less frozen.

He says he wants to buy fish and so we are searching for the proper glass bowl. We look and find nothing, and so he decides that he, in fact, doesn't want a fish after all. We walk back through the parking lot, lavender light lighting up our shadows as we walk beneath the cloudy sky. There is no thunder. There is no sound. Only our laughter and the wind breathing through the shopping carts like a kazoo. We begin to climb back into the car but I stop. Black and white. Dark and light. The sheets of electricity fill the sky and my hair stands on end.

"This is what I love about Spring," someone says.

"This is what I love about God," someone replies.

We pause for a moment and watch, the muddled air full of far too much for me to comprehend, and I cannot help but think that my rhetoric paper due tomorrow is of absolutely no consequence. We watch. We listen. We leave. We sigh. We pray. We dream. We return. We work. We write. We study. We hear the sounds of thunder echoing across the vale with a tremendous rumble.

Never have I felt so weighed down by winter, and therefore never have I so welcomed spring.

As I sit at my desk, the night air is driven through my window in gusts by the wind of the storm.

A single drop slips down the windowpane.

And it has begun to rain.