Week 136: Box of Rain

I’ve tried saying it before, but how is someone supposed to react when I tell them that I’ve always had a premonition that I would die in a car crash? Most people take it as what it is, a random prediction, a few might think of it as a prelude to an anecdote and will want to hear more. Most, however, just think it’s a weird thing to say and change the subject.

Sometimes I would say it as an apology for being a fidgety passenger. But most of the time I would say it because saying it makes it less likely to be true, less of an issue, turns it into a cool story, a crazy thought, a clever trick of the mind. So I’ve said this many different times – I have a premonition that I will die in a car crash – to many different people – I have a premonition that I will die in a car crash – over the course of many different years – I have a premonition that I will die in a car crash. And now I am in a car crash and I think this is what I’ve been talking about all these years. I’ve just spaced out and ran a stop sign at full speed and there is no way to avoid running head-on into the side of that passing truck. And time has stopped for a moment and I think about that first time I had that premonition.

It was many many years ago in an endless Texas highway under an endless Texas sky and blood is raining down through the broken glass of a windshield rainbow. And bones are bursting like bamboo stems and teeth are shattering into thousands of tiny pieces.

And back then time also stopped. But back then, it was me who wouldn’t let time go on. I refused to let it move forward as if i knew what was coming. I fought it tooth and nail, bones and flesh, refusing the obvious conclusion, preferring to rot away in a night that repeats and repeats and repeats until there is no beginning and no end, just one endless Texas circle of strife and struggle from whence there is only one way out, through a screen of blood and glass, pain, fear and death.

Back then I had the choice, so I didn’t let it go on. No, the fear of the known outcome was greater than the pain of an unknown eternity, so fear prevailed and the dream passed, and now it’s just a dream we dreamed one afternoon, long ago. Like my first heartbreak.

My first heartbreak would also pass like a dream. But I didn’t know that at the time, and I didn’t know my body would heal and my mind would heal and my heart would heal. And I would live again, and love again. Until I found the love I have now, which moves forward each day with every dawn, lying in bed, my daughter’s head nuzzled in my wife’s hair, my wife’s arms stretched over my chest, the birds chirping through the cracked window, and time moving joyfully into the unknown with every blissful second.

But not now. Now I was frozen in time, the front of the car already smashed in and my body hurtling towards the dashboard on the way to the window, and the steam from the burst radiator, and the open skies beyond. Frozen in that moment, I am thinking of another car, years before. A parked car, late at night in an empty college lot, and I am having the final conversation with my first dear love. Oh how I loved her. And because I loved her I sat in the parked car trying to understand why she was breaking up with me. It just didn’t make sense.

I can’t explain it, she’d say, and would then explain a hundred situations where I had not considered her feelings. She was trying to explain away the pain she felt she was causing me. But the pain just built up and up, one drop of blood at a time flowing into my heart, filling it and filling it, sensing that it was dying and using all resources to keep it beating. And I felt weak and faint. I must have looked like the ghost of a three year old asking why, over and over.

I was deaf to her answers. I couldn’t hear her, and I couldn’t see any of the things she was describing. I loved her blindly, and blindly i had lost her. Oh how I loved her, and how young I had loved her. How could i have forgotten that young love? Now it was coming back to me clear like it wasn’t all those years ago, all those several lives ago, all those previous reincarnations we forget like so many dreams of one afternoon long ago. And she broke up with me. It was the first time i heard anyone say, I love you, but I’m not in love with you.

Not too long before, she had told me she had missed her period and she was on her way to the doctor to get a pregnancy test. She had been keeping this secret for weeks. I wish she had told me before, but she hadn’t. I told her as much, but I think the words came out sounding more like me saying, I’m confused, surprised, I don’t know what to do. Later she told me she had gone, and was not pregnant. I felt relieved and thought things were back to normal. But that was my blind love thinking.

In the car when she broke up with me, I never considered the possible pregnancy as having anything to do with the breakup, and she never mentioned it. Now, however, looking at so much blood and shattered glass, I couldn’t but see that episode as the lens that put the relationship into focus for her. I may be wrong, it doesn’t matter, and it didn’t matter, I was heartbroken. They call it heartbreak because it feels like your heart is breaking in pieces, but what is really happening is that all the blood from your body is going to your heart. All your blood fills up the heart until it presses against your rib cage and feels like it’s being crushed by the bony grip of your ribs.

As a result I wanted to break everything in my house. The records, the chairs, the dishes, I wanted to break them all into little pieces thinking that would make the pain go away. Instead i walked out of any doorway, felt my way like the day before. Maybe I’d find direction around some corner where it’d been waiting to meet me.

My roommate and his girlfriend were returning to our house and they drove up next to me and asked me how i was. I could see my desperation reflected on their worried expressions, so I swallowed my heart, cut them short, and told them I was going for a walk. And I walked away as fast as possible before they could see the tears start to run.

And I walked and walked. And I cried and cried. Tears streamed from my eyes as I walked in a sudden storm that came seemingly out of nowhere as if saying, it’s ok, I’ll cover for you. And I growled from the bottom of my gut under the cover of thunder. I don’t know how long i walked, but each step took me further and further into pain.

How she found me I don’t know. She was my girlfriend’s best high school friend. And she found me walking on that long road, drenched in water. She gave me her hand because I needed a hand, and she said it was ok to hurt because I needed to be ok to hurt, and she gave me a song because I needed a song. And the song let my blood, and my blood again flowed freely, and I was able to breathe again.

Now, however, I am frozen in time, facing the horror of pieces of shattered glass as small as sand encrusted into my teeth and face, the horror of my shins broken into a thousand splinters against the dashboard, the horror of a premonition lived many times over and over to the point when I keep asking myself if this is really it. And all I can hear is the song she gave me, Box of Rain, playing in my head over and over. “What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through? For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago.”

Just this morning I kissed my wife and daughter goodbye, papá is going to work, my wife told her, and then to me she said, I love you. And my daughter hugged me and my wife kissed me and I wished that I could freeze that moment in time. So instead of going to work, I drove. I drove like the way I walked that day when my heart broke for the first time, but instead of pain, my heart was full of joy. I put Box of Rain on repeat in the car stereo and drove, and tried to go back to that perfect moment, that beautiful moment, worth many lifetimes of struggles.

But time moves forward in stops and stutters. And now, I’m laying on the pavement, “sun and shower, wind and rain, in and out the window like a moth before a flame.” All I can hear is that song, over and over in my head, or was it coming from the car stereo?

Two men lifted me unto the back of a pickup truck, my head feeling like it was going to detach itself from the body, like someone had run a knife from one side to the other and all that was holding the head in place was a thin bit of flesh.

“It’s all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago. Walk into splintered sunlight, inch your way through dead dreams to another land.” Beautiful music saved my life then, but was not going to save it now.

And my mind was flooded with thoughts of my wife and daughter, their beautiful love like a flower opening ever so slowly, an endless mystery unfolding through words half spoken, thoughts unclear. And at that thought my heart broke for the last time, and burst into the night with all the blood it had been holding for so many years, spraying all of it to the skies, from the first drop that filled it all those years ago, to the last, all my blood all at once into the open air, free at last from its prison, free at last, like a broken box of rain. “It’s just a box of rain, I don’t know who put it there, believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare, and it’s just a box of rain, or a ribbon for your hair, such a long long time to be gone, and a short time to be there.”