Calm

Drip...drip...drip...drip. I watch as the raindrops trickle off the roof and land one after the other in the puddle beneath. Drip...drip...drip. The rain had slowly subsided and the sun now starts to peer out from behind the clouds as a kind of reaffirmation it still existed. The air lies still and deathly silent apart from the continuous drip, drip, drip of the trickling drops. For some strange reason I feel calm, almost content with my deal of life; the calm after the storm?
Drip...drip...drip. The falling drops wake me out of the trance I fall into when thinking. It's a reassuring sound; in all the silence it's somewhat reassuring to know there is a continuance when the rest of the world seems to have come to a standstill. A sense of normality. I wonder sometimes what is normality. Is hurt normal? Is being let down normal? We all accept what we get-being used and abused-without thinking what we can do to change it. Always waiting, praying for someone else to change it for us. Sometimes it gets too much. Too many suffering souls, too much confusion...
Drip...drip...drip. Again they wake me, jerking me out of my thoughts and back to reality. For the first time I look down at my hands, hands that strangely don't feel like they belong to me. The knuckles pale as they clench an object tightly, a knife. For reality it all seems definitively unreal, the blade I hold glinting in the fresh sunlight.
The sound of a bird distracts me and I look up, the calm�s passing now as is my time yet thoughts of the future pass through my mind. It doesn't matter to me anymore though, nothing matters anymore. As I look back down again my hands seem to move of their own accord. The blade of the knife is sharp but I hardly notice the pain, the all too familiar pain. The sound of dripping starts again, this time red drops instead of clear ones. Drip...drip...drip...drip. It's a comforting sound.
�Kiandra Riley 2004