I don't often talk about the weather, simply because - even in Northern Virginia - it's about as inane as talking about sports statistics or varieties of domestic begonia, but on occasion nature throws an interesting curveball. For instance, psychic rain! Guaranteed to start the minute vanitashaze steps off the bus. For four days running. It's not raining constantly, oh no! It's attuned, and it appears to be attuned to me.

It is pretty, though, in a sort of black widow way. Rain overflowing the gutters; I know it's going to flood the basement, but right now it feels like I'm on the inside of a waterfall, a secret place, in Atlantis beneath the sea, invisible in some way, or maybe just not existing in the first place - being outside the continuum, in nonspace, nontime. Thunder, even though it terrifies the dog. Strange how it makes me feel safer, smaller. That smell that rises up right before it starts, earth and wetness and roots - a very spring smell, and it's only there for a minute or so, but it's one of the things that never fails to make me content. One of the smells that I immediately associate, like musty towels with camp and coconut lotion with watching pirated Teen Titans episodes at three in the morning after cheering a basketball game: running on the euphoria of sleeplessness; restlessness; hopeless, desperate, unreturned teenaged love; not sure how things would someday be better, exactly, but knowing they would. That same feeling of being out of time. Of winning, in some way, a place for myself where there was none. Of cheating fate.