Becoming a Current

The bus stop was made up of a single sign reading “City Bus Stop” and three cement blocks for benches. Normally the benches would be filled with people waiting and many more standing. Today only one person sat on one of the blocks, furtively writing on a piece of white paper using his knee as a desk. The rest of the waiting crowd stood under the awning of a building 200 feet away watching the rain slowly turning the streets into rivers. S everyone’s eyes moved to the man sitting on the bench, long soaked with rain and not seeming to care. Some looked at one another, as if they had proposed a question and expected to find the answer in the faces, and some looked down feeling embarrassed.

His paper and pen had not been out the entire time he had been sitting there. For a few minutes, these instruments sat in a plastic baggy in his coat’s inside pocket. He had sat hunched over letting the water seep through all his layers of clothes and through his hair, now draping and dripping into his eyes. He had pulled it back and tucked it behind his ears and then pulled the baggy from his pocket and emptied its contents onto his lap. He immediately began writing:

“It is raining and my anger comes from the fact that rain cannot be more wet, that it cannot soak into my skin to my lungs and saturate them and cause me to drown as I sit right here. I would fall over and finally stop breathing. People would come to see what is wrong and find I am not breathing any longer. The autopsy would reveal that I died of drowning, and this would be seen as impossible. That will be my first and final triumph.”

As he wrote the last few words the paper disintegrated in his hands, its fragile, soaked body being pulled apart by the falling rain. Some pieces clung to his knee so he could see the rain wash away the ink he had just placed. He began crying and his tears mixed with the rainwater flowing down his face so that not even he himself could tell which drops had come from his body and which from the sky.

The bus arrived, water diving away from its tires and the mass of people left their cover and passed the man. Some looked at him as they passed but most kept their eyes forward and kept their feet moving.

He sat on the bench, feeling his warm tears join the cold rainwater in streams on his face and then turn into waterfalls, falling down onto the shreds of paper lying on the ground before him that had not yet been washed away.