2:55am, it rains. I find it appropriate, comforting; the pattern trembles and shakes under the weight of little droplets, lachrymose sky. I scroll back through the pages of the recent archives and the weight of the ancient tome is a friend; warm and heavy, it rests upon my lap and comforts aching bones.
The pages are splotched and discolored; old vellum marked by ink set by careful hand over ages. The words are writ large and with bold strokes; the author is unrepentant and without regret, all things are set to the page. There are no strikes on these pages; they are pristine in their purpose and without error. There are no notations in the margins; this book never sees study nor revision; the entirety of it is a masterwork; the notes of a single experience that is comprised of many experiences.
My hands rest upon the last paragraphs and my fingers find the miniscule differences between texture; the weight of the ink and the depressions of its placement against the smooth, virgin space of emptiness that follows the last punctuation. I ponder punctuation, briefly; the differences between ellipse and period. In this moment, it seems a silly, human distinction; the pause, the conclusion, and the ending, all of which are one another, little litotes.
Pleonasm, the curse reworked as craft. It is the sly expression of ego tremblingly disguised; walking like a sheep amongst the wolfpack and oscillating between glee and ghastly horror.
This is all irrelevant, of course. The ink splashes and runs in quiescent lines while the hand pretends it does “important things”. Laughter does not have an indicator but for the ludicrous length of the word that names it; “hlah”, proto-Germanic and little more before this.
Lines that waste time and distract from the river of things rushing and tumbling over one another; all the thoughts and feelings that are not this moment, a noisy and wild conglomeration of things that, taken together, seem as if water running downhill.
This moment is simple. It is breathing. It is listening to the rain. It is dry and without purpose or meaning. It is.
A pause; the hand lifts from the page for a moment and then, plunges down and continues as the metaphor of one river becomes another and the ghost of that German baritone renders the word into sound; the repetative percussive hlah.
Life as pleonasm; sitting and dribbling words like so much drool; cerebral raindrops made ink on a non-existent page.
It is to laugh.