soft rains

I shared a squalid apartment in a coastal town with a bunch of young people during the late days of the pandemic. Someone in the flat had two fathers, and I ran into one of them floating in an inter-tube under a local bridge. I was trying to swim between the pillars, but I was encumbered by my backpack and the current had taken both of us by surprise. He whispered the day’s virus numbers to me as we clung to the inter-tube. Once I made it to the other side, we all met up at a cafe and my father appeared to tell me that my childhood friend had died, not as a result of the virus—”but it certainly didn’t help”. Later, I walked down the coastline outside of town, which was densely forested and had long, rough stone paths between columns that I kept trying to photograph. Other walkers chided me for my desperation to record such an ordinary scene. At times, the ocean seemed to run backwards up into pools on the hillside above. Realizing that I couldn’t stay there forever, I decided to become a detective in Hong Kong, and luckily one of the boats tied up to the dock was about to return there. It began to rain softly as we huddled on the small, curved deck, and I learned the Cantonense phrase for ”he’s addicted to the pursuit, as am I” as the town shrank in the distance.