July 11, 2000
 

The New Rodent Review

    Here is the last chapter of my never to be written romance novel. Just remember we all have a romance novel in us and it is up to each of us to deny the urge to write it.

    It started raining. The sky had been threatening to spit its contents at me all day.  Now the clouds were spilling down on me and on the rows of cars parked like books in the non-fiction section of the public library. The wind was doing it's best impression of an acupuncturist and driving each needle like drop into my exposed skin.  I was getting wetter as each second was marked by another thousand buckets of rain falling from the sky. My shoes were beginning to leak.
    I had been standing on the corner waiting for the one person who wouldn't have batted an eye if she had found out that this was the Second Flood.  She would be the one planning a cookout when the sun went supernova. And it didn't surprise me, when she came wandering down the street jumping in every puddle, that she was soaked through and through. Looking like some coed at a wet T-shirt contest in Burma during monsoon season. She smiled at me through the driving storm. Smiling, why was she always smiling?
    She splashed into a new lake that had just appeared on 15th Street and a wave washed up onto the shore. Two cigarette butts, a subway pass, and what appeared to be the tail end of a hot dog wrapped in foil came to rest at my feet. She looked good. I know there is nothing new about a drenched woman looking good, but its usually the water that makes the girl look sexy, not the other way around.
    Her hand moved to the side of my face and brushed away what must have been a rain drop. I laughed thinking how ridiculous the gesture seemed. Yet she was very sad and serious and wiped the same spot. And then she moved in close and whispered into my ear, "You're drenched." I laughed again. And this time she laughed.
    I had been waiting for her for an hour. I looked into her eyes I realized I would have waited days to see that smile and to hear that laugh. Having to be the responsible one is not always the worst thing in the world. And at that moment there in the rain I knew I would stand on this same corner, or a different corner, again and again for the rest of our lives. Stuck in the rain with my heart on my sleeve not really sure that she would show.
    That was the moment when I jumped up in the air and landed in the 15th Street Lake and another wave worked its way across to the opposite shore. I was as soaked as she was. And we walked together into a hurricane.

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