A Song of Rain

I wanted to write a song about the rain, but all I could think of was her last November, when we sprinted laughing through the downpour, the cobblestones glistening beneath the trees of our cherished field. Now, my tea has cooled. I only drink it to hold on to a fragment of the girl I loved—dandelion tea with a splash of milk, the way she took it. Outside, the rain has stopped, and my fingers hover over a blank page. The melodies in my head pivot and flee like elusive ghosts. Yesterday, someone asked me how songwriting was going. I could think only of her.

She had taken my hand as the sun sank behind the hills in the Three Valleys, her fingers cold yet reassuring in mine. The moist air carried the fragrance of summer evenings, one that forever reminded me of our initial encounter at a bustling summer festival.

The scent of roasted chicken thighs mingled with the sweat of bodies pressed together. The expansive heat was oppressive, closing in like tight spaces. I saw her twirling with her fingers stretched to the night sky as fireworks snapped and crackled, illuminating blackness with bright shades of red, orange, and white. From my seat on the grass, she looked like magic to my eyes—almost translucent.

Her eyes were closed to the world as she spun round, as though it was too much to take in even then.

I sprang up and pulled her back to keep her from colliding with a passing group of children. Only then did she open her eyes, and I read in them a depth of passion and voiceless sorrow simmering beneath quiet pools.

“Keegan,” I said. I kept her hand safe in mine.

“Skye,” she replied. She flitted around me, beckoning me to come.

Such was our dance for years, a drawing near and pulling away I was unable to grasp.

It has been five hundred and seventy-six days since she left.

Some memories are soft, draped in the gentle hues of happier times, like when she sang a song I wrote one winter, her voice a clear ringing that danced in the frosty air. We were at the height of our love affair then, enveloped in a cocoon of shared dreams and whispered promises. “Keegan,” she’d say, tugging gently at my beard in her habitual way.

With her alone could I share the songs I’d written for the piano—carefully chosen notes as precious to me as crystal. Although she wondered at my cautious music, she hummed my songs and so enraptured me. We would make our way in the world with our creations, she and I.

I marveled then that she could be mine, this girl who smelled of summer breeze drifting through leaves and freshly brewed tea, this girl whose touch left remnants of starlight upon my skin.

She’d grab my hand and pull me into the tea shop. With the old owner, she wore the bubbly mask she always did outside, talking of Sage Grey and who could have had such a name. Our friends delighted in her presence even as she kept her sleeves pulled down. She laughed often and spoke of her art. The tea shop owner would promise to visit the next time she set up shop at the weekly market. They chatted about herbs he mixed to achieve the flavors in his teas; she delighted in the dandelion root, carob, and chicory root mixtures. She told him he was a boundary breaker like she was.

In those days, our small cottage overflowed with the clutter of our creative endeavors—she painted canvases in wild bursts of inspiration, while pages of my unfinished songs lay scattered about. I once stepped over wayward paintbrushes and crumpled sheets of lyrics, each step a journey through a museum of our shared dreams.

“You have paint in your hair,” I said, brushing it from her face and rubbing the tendrils between my fingers.

“And you have ink on your nose.” She laughed, and warmth filled me as I scooped her up and lost my balance, knocking the paint onto her work as we tumbled to the floor.

I followed the splatter pattern and turned to her in horror.

“I think it’s much improved, actually.” She ran a finger across my cheek, leaving a streak of red. “And so are you.”

She laughed once more. I hoped I could listen to that laugh for the rest of my life.

I did not yet know the sorrow she masked with smiles and laughter.

From the tea shop owner, she learned herb lore and grew poisonous belladonna beneath our window. “Health in small doses,” she said. Yet she would not reply when I asked why she needed so many.

Our love, too, was a canvas, painted in strokes of passion and pain, a masterpiece of complexities. But like any piece of art, it was subject to interpretation, and while I saw a future, she saw only chains. It showed in her work. Her last canvas bore thick black strokes crossing over vibrant colors, like bars across a window. People say only the mad pursue art with reckless abandon. She was such a one. I did not see madness in the beginning, only passion, and longed to bring an ounce of hers into my music-making.

“I paint the wind, storm, and rage until I find the calm in the very center.” She lay back, propping herself up with her elbows, her hand stretched toward the canvas of swirling grey with splashes of red and blue—an erratic composition.

I preferred the paintings she did for market day: scenes of the cottage and goats roaming the countryside and valleys around Hyll. Even in their simplicity, she streaked her skies with navy blue and dark grey. “Someday I could compose a song tracing the strokes of your painting, and thus thread our hearts together,” I murmured into her ear.

But she did not answer. She never answered anything about the future. “It’s lovely outside. Dance with me,” she said instead.

“Later.”

She got up to fling some more paint on the canvas, then ran outside to dance alone. I watched her from the window, wondering what fear held me rooted in my seat when no other eyes would have seen us.

Her movements in the moonlight appeared feral, as if she were both one with the earth and not of it.

The droplets shimmered in her hair under starlight as she danced alone to music only she could hear, moving with a grace that transcended the bounds of an ordinary world.

I wonder now if she had always danced that way, in her own private universe, and I had failed to notice. I wonder if that was the reason she chose to leave.

Each day, the void grows wider, resonating only in a chamber of memories.

Some memories are mixed, a mingling of warmth and razor-sharp coldness, like a market day when she went to sell some of her pieces. The morning before we were to depart, she came out from the bedroom while I played my newest composition and asked why I was too afraid to step out from the bars of conventional music.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Music must come from the soul, yet where is your soul in yours? I hear echoes of you only.”

“Even artists must fill their coffers so they can eat, my love. I write songs I can play at the cafe and perhaps someday for nobles. How else will we live?” I opened my arms to her, for she had swayed, and I saw shadows beneath her eyes.

She came to me. I stroked her hair and said, “This is my music. I enjoy it. Do you not also sell conventional paintings so we might eat?”

At once, she flew from me, her eyes ablaze. She silently snatched a knife from the kitchen and began tearing into the paintings set apart for market day with a fury before my mind could fathom what my eyes perceived.

Never again would she paint for others.

Her continued absence from the marketplace caused whispers through the town; they gathered around us, swelling to a cacophony I could not bear. She retreated further into herself. The cocoon that once held our shared dreams broke, its pieces scattered into the sky, and she wove another that had room only for herself.

With our friends, she still laughed and sang. They asked why she did not paint anymore, but she said her art was for her eyes only, so they dismissed it as another of her strange fancies. The tea shop owner looked on. I saw worry knit his brows.

Other memories hurt, cutting through the fog of my days, like a day in Autumn when the sky tore itself apart, its tears mingling with mine, as I searched for words to stitch together the growing chasm between us.

And another day yet earlier, when she cupped my hand in hers, and her eyes searched mine as she traced with my fingers the pain she had written upon her skin. I held her then as I held her many times after, as though my arms alone possessed the power to anchor her drifting soul. The scent of fresh paint mingled with the damp from the coming storm and wafted through the air with our breath. Outside, the birds sang and flitted to and fro between the eaves of our cottage and the trees. I could barely hear them through the pounding of my own heart.

“Why?”

“Because I do not know if I am alive.” Her body stiffened along with mine, and she drew herself from my grasp once more.

“So you carve these lines across your skin? To what? Prove you bleed like the rest of us?” I held onto her wrist; my fingers brushed against the ridged surface, once smooth. “Don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know how it hurts me when you hurt yourself like this?”

She wrenched her arm away and held it with the other as if I’d burned her. I could not understand her fury. “You are not listening.”

Was I not?

The question drove me to sit before those black and white keys now, but the silence of truncated melodies taunted me in scattered sheets on the floor around me. Hours had passed, but only stray notes remained until all I could do was smash my hands against the keys in a cacophony of anguish. Yet those seconds may have held more truth than any efforts in those crumbled pages.

She lived her life in a dance with shadows, measuring out her days in multiples of nightshade petals until she achieved eternal sleep. Now I tally marks of bereft melodies on this silent piano. How many more beats must I endure before I can cross the veil to find her? Would I find her waiting or lost in her dance among the stars?

It has been five hundred and seventy-six days since she died, and still I wish I had danced. I wish I had joined her under that starlit sky, moving to the rhythm of her world. Maybe then, I would have understood the silent song in her heart, the one she danced to alone.

Nights stretch into eternity. Stray notes float and clang against each other within my skull, pushing sleep to the edges until at last I surrendered any notion of rest.

In a corner where I left piles of her belongings untouched, I pulled paint-covered sheets from old perfume bottles and baskets of paintbrushes, pushing them aside until I found the stack of paintings she’d left behind.

The one I sought was small enough to hold with one hand: two tiny figures dancing beneath starlight.

I strayed to the piano with the painting and placed it on the stand before me. My fingers faltered and hesitated before finding new yet familiar chords. In the dim candlelight, the first strains took shape and weaved together the stray threads of a song.

Perhaps it’s not too late to learn the steps. Perhaps in the notes of the song I’m struggling to write, I’ll find her again—not as a memory, but as a muse, guiding my fingers across the keys. In music, I might discover solace, a means to connect the divide between our worlds.

I write, not about the rain, but about her—my love, the girl who carried the fragrance of Summer yet belonged to Winter.

I write, and the song becomes mine—a path forward, a dance of healing, hope amidst echoes of what was.

As I delve into the composition, each note becomes a vessel for unspoken words and unshed tears.

The hours pass unnoticed as I play and rewrite, pouring my heart into every chord. I’m no longer just a grieving lover; I’m a storyteller, chronicling our journey together, immortalizing it in music. This song is my ode to her, a testament to my heart, shades of melancholy woven through the love branded on my heart.

As dawn spreads its lighted wings through the window, I set down my quill, the song complete.

I whisper to the air, “Would you have danced to this?”

My fingers flit over the keys, bringing to life our story of joy and sorrow. Yet no sweet presence emerges to share in my accomplishment, only her specter haunting each note. The song lingers in the air, a reminder of past lives and a future reshaped into one I did not want but must endure.

The rain still falls on our cherished field, but now I hear different music in its rhythm.

It has been five hundred and seventy-six days since she died, and the days without her will continue with the heaviness of regret in my limbs, but today—in the empty cottage, my feet tracing patterns on floorboards still stained with her paint—I choose to dance.