03.28.2003 - 3:01 p.m.

The sky is bright, and I am wet, hair matted and sticking to my sodden shirt in that way which only happens in amusement parks after the flume ride. As with any number of other things in my life, this bedraggled state of being was not a part of the master plan, but then, that is what master plans are for: to bear witness to the basic, insurmountable difference between life and the way we understand it.

I was coming back from a lab session, four minutes� leisurely walk down the path. The sky was dripping but only in tiny, almost weightless flecks of moisture, which I was enjoying. I was walking past the pond�s high water mark, thinking of that master plan, when I heard the raindrops begin in the trees and felt the little zephyrs begin twirling past my face to gather into a wind. It moved quickly, the cloudburst and the wind before it.

I�ve always thought that wind is what prophecy would smell like.

I haven�t worn a coat to work in weeks; I don�t even own an umbrella. I left the house thinking I might need my coat and choosing not to bring it, but the fact that I�d brought myself to this place between the water and the flood did not grant me the power to escape it. So I kept walking. There was no point in speeding up; I�d left my laptop in my office because some part of me had known I would find myself here, waiting for the fall. Some part of me always knows.

It poured. People around me, similarly unprepared, started sprinting for the buildings. The rain plastered my khakis to my legs, slick and clammy, but I did not speed up. It penetrated down to my scalp, tickling through my hair to drip against my eyelashes, but still I did not speed up, only bowing my head, just enough to keep my eyes free. It hissed against my ears: This is how it will end, and I thought, Maybe I like it this way.

-stonebridge

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