There’s a single moment for a raindrop, when it breaks free from the granite sky and pelts the glass beside my bed in one fat slop. It hangs there as a perfect, crystalline globe. And it twinkles. A sort of playful wink before it takes the final descent. An abrupt, rolling slither that leaves a trail of liquefied dignity—its legacy. Then it soaks into the sill, its watermark having been noticed. Acknowledged.
Such dignity doesn’t afford itself to just any raindrop. It doesn’t show itself in tempests, in frog-swallowing monsoons, or even during sun showers. It can’t be found in the aftermath of a squall, or even in the great, rushing waters of the mighty Niagara. These offer no permanence. Their waters rush past before they can be quantified down to a true, solitary essence: the raindrop.
In this place of decay, under this granite cloth, between these granite walls, beneath this granite sky—nothing is permanent. Dignity rarely washes up at the foot of this bed, cluttered with a twisted superhighway of tubes and wires all attached to the corresponding network inside my rusted frame. I can’t hope to find it in the rubber smiles of the weekend triage. They lust for racquetball matches and family barbecues and Sunday drives as they sanitize bedpans and serve chicken broth.
I can only look to the old man—even older than I—who snores behind the curtain that separates our beds. His sawing subsides to groaning and then to heavy, uneven breathing, and then to reticent, incoherent mumbling—in that order. These are his only forms of communication.
His eyes make round creases under paper eyelids. At his feet are Matchbox cars and empty juice boxes and broken crayons. The trappings of youth. His grandson—a jackrabbit of a boy with curly, red hair and a face full of freckles—races tiny Corvettes and Thunderbirds up one of the old man’s wrinkled calves and down the other. The boy is immune to the granite walls, oblivious to the stray drops on the window. There will be many more opportunities to see them in a lifetime of precipitation. All the while the old man snores and groans, breathes and mumbles, having almost completely fulfilled his life’s quota.
Another fat drop.
It suspends, winks, and rolls into nothingness.
Another. And another. And one more. They roll down in casual unison. They fan watery trails like peacock feathers and submit to eternity.
Soon I shall follow. And the old man—the wheels of his bed locked in place a few yards from my own—he too shall follow. While I wash from distant rooftops to seamless gutters to the nameless rabble of the water table—to be forgotten—the old man trickles, in a single, dignified droplet, into the memories of his freckled, little jackrabbit.
Slop. Suspend. Wink. Roll. Nothing.
How I long to be an orphaned raindrop.