Oregon Coastal Rainforest

The rain was steady...a comforting soothing sound like far-off music, drowning out perfect silence but not loud enough to disturb the peace.

In her mother's house she listened as the rain descended on the roof, the color outside her window a black that could only be seen if far from city lights. 

And city sounds.  Just weeks ago he had called from the static noise of New York...another business trip, another city in a rain.  The conversation was short...he didn't want to disturb her while back at home...but his voice was strained. 

The distance was beginning to descend...causing cracks and fissures.  She remembered the sirens in the background, the pulse of a city pumping through the phone, horns and the sounds of strangers as he walked the street.  She could barely hear him and said so...it frustrated him and they hung up the phone with him in his noise and her in the quiet.

She remembered a field trip she had taken, one time in middle school...young enough to be excited about something new...and the bus had lumbered its way into the mountains surrounding the Shenandoah...as they ascended on switch-back roads the clouds came alongside the road and when the bus finally started the visibility was cut to feet...and they piled out into small groups in the parking lot, surrounded by the trees and unable to see much of anything.  She remembered she had her camera, and had drifted off to the side away from the group...wanting to capture a photo of the forest, free without a bunch of other kids in view. 

It had started to rain, and the noise of rain in the forest was new for her...the water on the leaves, not all hitting the ground, but rather hitting the branches and the trees...it was the most peaceful sound she had ever heard and while she tried to take a photograph it was the noise in her ears that was captured.

She heard a teacher yelling and she came out towards the buses...she was late in returning and all the others were already onboard...she took a seat in the back, hearing the rain on the tin roof of the bus.

It sounded nothing like the rain in the forest.


As she now sat on the bed in her mother's house the rain sounded like that bus ride rain...she pulled off her socks and smirked...he had purchased them for her before Christmas.  A small and innocuous gesture, the least romantic type of gift but he had always commented whenever she pulled hers off...usually before peeling off her clothes in a ritual movement that sometimes included him.  And his.

But her mother's house was far away, and so was he.  She laid back on the bed, the rain still steady...wondering if he was in the air or on the ground. 

She remembered the last time he was beside her.

She remembered the last time he was inside her.

Both were in a room that was not in her mother's house...rather a neutral place.  Not a home, not an island, but a place where the worlds could intersect.

She remembered the breadth of the bed, the cool collection of the sheets and the proximity...the somewhat interesting dichotomy of the sweat of the brows and the cooler air outside.  It had been extraordinarily quiet...almost too quiet.

Except the breathing.  The inhalation and exhalation...the sensation of a body recovering from exertion...a delightful and delicious sensation but it was very quiet otherwise.

She remembered he had flipped open his phone and pushed a few buttons...a beautiful sound of rain emitted...a very long ago noise that she had burrowed into her brain and it burst open in a memory that was so different from her bus-ride rain.

She had asked him what he was playing on the phone, what app, what website, what music source.

When he replied it was the exact same place that she had remembered...and this time she had pulled the covers up and burrowed into him.

She thought about that, laying on the bed in her mother's home, the rain sounds a bus-ride rain again.