Rain seems to make the world feel a lot more romantic. Maybe it’s a mediacentric archetype driven by classic 1950s films. Maybe a bit of Bogey and Audrey’s hidden in my thoughts. But the bottom line is, I’ve always wanted to walk a girl home in the rain. Some kind of wonderful, that would be.
Sadly, it wasn’t as amazing as I had hoped. In fact, it was the opposite—a disastrous night leading to an utterly forgettable weekend that stained me for a year.
They leave the juicy bits out sometimes. Long before Ricki Lake or Jenny Jones fed us the meat, the black and white silver screen filtered our imagination. Those films, they knew how to calculate emotions: Just the right touch of sadness, of love, of hope and the string would stretch—but not pop.
It was perfect.
But that night, as I walked her home, something was miscalculated. Gravely, so. The rain fell harshly. We had no umbrellas and we weren’t holding each other by our shoulders. I was walking five paces behind, five paces to the left. Somehow, that’s how it turned out. Somehow, I didn’t make an attempt to get closer. Not again.
I had given up.
Too much confusion, role-playing. Too many expectations. When we had arrived at her residence, she asked me something and I said something and then I walked away. It seemed simple. But she had to follow and chase and catch up by fate’s little mistake. And then I said something and walked away again.
You know, it’s not the same anymore. You can’t make it happen twice. You can’t.