Do You Feel Loved?
1:34 AM, Wednesday morning. I’m listening to a U2 song right now and buzzing on some blackberry wine. Hey, do you feel loved?
I should be sleeping. I want to get myself back into a “daylight” cycle instead of all this nighttime writing and such. Still…I’ve got some sort of groove going at the moment and I just feel like tapping it out…
There was an evening when I was in high school; it seems like years ago because, well, it was. Deep into July, we’d had a heavy summer rainstorm. At around 5 PM the water stopped dropping out of the sky. The transition between rain and stillness was as sharp as the click of a switch. It was warm. Before, the sun’s still shining light had been cloaked by potent heaps of dark clouds; now those mountains of air had shifted, letting the heavy rays through.
Did you ever see one of those old sepia-toned photographs? Can you imagine being in one of them — everything around you tinted in shades of thin brownish yellow? The moment the sun’s light poured back in after the rain was like that.
Only everything turned luminous greenish gold.
The color was surreal and saturating. It was metallic and at the same time as organic as the iris of a lion’s eye. Pouring in through our windows, it changed everything about the house.
I went outside and just looked at it all. The trees were thick with water, their sheened leaves glimmering with thousands of incandescent droplets. The grass of my backyard looked like someone had spilled a trillion diamonds on it. Breathing the air was like sucking the ozone off of a lightning bolt. You could smell the wet earth. And everywhere was that unreal color. It was a tint that you could almost feel. It added weight to everything, picked out the details in razor-sharp clarity.
And everything was so quiet.
There was a feeling of imminence to the scene, like something unheard of, new, and at the same time profoundly old was going to happen with your next breath. It was so strange and so common, so…expectant.
I watched and breathed it for a series of long moments.
Then those colors slowly started fading down to normalcy — I stayed and watched it all. Eventually it was just the aftermath of a summer rainstorm.
Now it’s 2:22 AM and I am tired.
“Do you feel loved?”
— JWR, 3/11/98