The city around was on the pause. In the childish play of the coming storm the wind caught up the end of his tie and showed up its presence to the empty sidewalk. The mirror skyscrapers, with all their rudeness and immense cold bravery, were not scared by the weather. The man wasn't afraid of it either. Even the fact that the costume will be spoiled by rain drops didn’t make him run and hide. “Run and hide” he thought “is not for the samurai”. Anyway, he is too tired to be scared of anything.
Under many layers of business ethics, professionalism that he was taught in the graduate school, and million of cups of dark coffee you wouldn’t be able to find any sign of exhaust on his face. Watching people running back and forth along the streets, he couldn’t see them. His head was full of vespine buzz from the running numbers on the bright screen, income voice mails in the cell phone, people’s faces from the meeting all over the world, some of them angry… and much less happy… More, he didn’t know anymore what happiness was… A good substitute for this word was “profit”… That was all he needed for the last couple of years.
Rain. He remembered that he liked the rain, but he never knew why. What can represent the rain? Life? Or probably us? “One rain drop starts in the cold little spring, makes his way to the ocean, reaches the skies and with tremendous velocity falls back on the ground. Some of the rain drops end up in the puddles, among the streets, traffic, but it really doesn’t have any significance where you’ve been, you will return to the skies and then will fall again on the ground.” Such thoughts were vaguely, going in his background mind, it made him open his mouth and stare in the skies. They were dark, fast and bold “Storm. It’s going to be a storm.” He said to himself. “I need to go. … go where? Go home? What is there that will be happy to see me? A new TV set? Or the computer that is going to take me back to my job. Empty kitchen with an empty fridge? Windows looking on the same street? Why should I go home?
“I feel like chaos” he said to himself. That the feeling when you repeatedly think about doing something, for a long time, but never manage to get it done because you start thinking about something else, that seems to be better, and you still think about what you didn’t do, and about new thing, and even things that keep coming up in your mind more eagerly and with stronger desire to be done, and the more and longer you have all these things in your mind the worse this crave for the realization becomes and, eventually, you can’t do any of these things because you’re exhausted just because of thinking about them, however, they are still with you. It all accumulated in a milky way that goes circles around the only alive and shining part of your mind, which always tries to look on the positive side of the life, sort of the sun, which would prefer to be the moon and lose its gravitational energy for this brutal world of the things-desired-to-be-done.
Just in the middle of such reflections a taxi car stopped by. A driver, tanned skin, beard, and a blatant smile with own story, shout out: “Need a ride, sir?”
Just after he sat in the back seat of the taxi, first rain drop has fallen on the windshield, slowly sliding down, leaving a water track after itself. That was the last barrier for the coming flood of tears. He wept like a child and didn’t want to stop.
Taxi driver killed the engine.
Skies tired of holding all of the water, that made them look so dark and vicious, started the dance of crystals, covering the city, soothing every soul in a way that only story-holders know.