A cloud is just water—that’s what I tell myself, but it doesn’t help. Clouds are much more than that—more than a mere congregation of vapours—they’re the changing face of the sky, and a mirror where I can scree the inner precincts of my soul.
I’ve always been obsessed with clouds. They’re something outside me that calls to something inside me and they fill me with longing for some missing element that could make my life complete.
Maybe clouds aren’t just things—perhaps they’re a metaphor for someone—that mysterious girl I’ll never meet, who calls to me in dreams, and haunts me in a blur of a face down a crowded street or a song half-heard in sleep.
This beautiful sadness in me is continually calling—but what is it exactly? Is it a nuance or nuisance—a nuage of necessity, or a luminous patch on my heart’s Doppler weather screen?
“Daydreaming again, Derek? I’ve never met a man so haunted.”
Bri fixes me with an elfin smile that teases me back to reality. I color and counter with a lopsided grin certain women have told me is charming but doesn’t work with Bri who is beyond such ploys and know me too well to be taken in.
And it’s my loss, because she is lovely.
But, she belongs to Him. It seems everything I need lies beyond my reach—in this case possessed by a nameless, faceless partner who can’t be revealed, well, because he’s married, and can’t be discussed because the subject’s off limits.
So, we’re just friends—with boundaries, and blurry lines like clouds.
It begs the question, why I am even here—lost and lonely at this stage of my life, when I should be married with kids.
But when the whirlwind of emotions finally subsides, reality returns. I see the face of Autumn Gardner, my winsome nemesis and former lover—the only woman I ever met who reminded me of a rainstorm.
She left without explanation and tormented me with a cloud—a crocheted cloud she made and left for me—the only reminder I have of the many days we spent in Central Park staring at clouds.
She went to Peru.
I like to believe she’s scrambling over mountainous ruins exploring some ancient astronomical laboratory, decoding petroglyphs of the movements of the sky—not lying on a hillside with another lover staring at clouds.
But she drifted away and now she’s distant as Bri, distant as clouds, and another chapter in my book of pain.
