When it’s spring, we stake flimsy blue plastic funnels into soft mud. The rain gauge—otherwise known as the udometer, ombrometer, pluviometer, or hyetometer—measures the amount of liquid precipitation in a predefined area over a set period of time. I got mine for free at the public library. It clacks in my backpack as surely as my teeth rattle in my skull. April showers bring May flowers. With the forecast of incoming Providence spring storms, it's best we arm ourselves with a few.
We gauge but do not measure. Let me grab my shoddy toolbag. Where’s the plastic protractor to find the angle of success, yellow measuring tape to lengthen our love, micrometer to calculate daily depression marination? Why do we keep trying to categorize a life that is as fickle as a spring storm? A life that slips through my fingers like long stringy mucus, pulled toward the pit in the center of the earth. It's heavy and warm against my hands. Fresh out of the nozzle. When I lick it, it’s salty. Like a snail, it’s thick and wet, and leaves a shiny, snotty trail on everything it touches. Like a snail, it does not stay.
If I could, I’d pry my maw open and force the life-mucus down my throat, then down yours when my stomach runs out of room. It fills up my cavity space too quickly. Gastric mucosa replaced by exogenous slime. I can feel stomach acid being replaced by life’s shining sputum, mucosal epithelium revitalized in a new wash. I’ll let it into my alveoli—fill my lungs, take my breath away from me. In the sun, the life-snot evaporates, condensing mucin proteins and salt into crust along the back of my throat. It’s hard and sticky, and it blocks up every open pore I begged it to fill. In discomfort, it feels good to be full, for once. I’d beckon you to join me.
But I can’t. It's raining. I opt for other options instead.
I have a confession. Let me be multifaceted for a moment. Recently, my poison of choice has been gauging love in concern. Vulnerability used to come easily to us. It’d trickle down from shingled metal rooftops, mix with seedlings blooming in leaf-pulped gutters, and fall straight into our hands from the downspout. There was so much of it that we could splash it against our faces and have cups leftover to drink in our handcrafted ceramic mugs.
Autumn drought came. Our poor gutter dried up. I don’t know if you like me anymore. I can’t sip from the drainpipe so I turn to other canals. Or I think about them. Stupid things, like streaking across the Main Green. I want everyone’s eyes on me. If my body were made of rubber, jumping off the roof of the SciLi, I would shoot across campus like a swirly blue bouncy ball. Other stupid ideas, like piercing my ears, getting a tattoo, or bashing my head into drywall. Funny ones too, like screaming “happy birthday” in the Ratty or hugging you so tightly you pop or chugging unfortunate concoctions from the Andrews soda machine. I don’t want to destroy myself. I do want to destroy myself. The layers of mucus have gotten so thick that I am nothing behind foamy white film. It was clear, once. Can anyone see me?
It’s less for the destruction of things. More for the yearning. There are words for this, more labels and categorizations: impulsive thoughts, narcissistic attention-seeking, insecurity. Whatever. I just want to drink the rain again.
I think, if you really loved me, you’d stop me, you’d ask if I’m okay. How else can I know? There’s a thrill in doing something that you know is bad for you, like a kid caught in the cookie jar. I think it’s because I’m lost. Somewhere along the way, I lost the equation for how to know if you are loved. It slipped out of my fingers like a plastic receipt on a windy day, out of the grocery bag and into a river somewhere. I feel lost when I meander between buildings and groups of smiling people. I feel lost when I sit across from you at dinner.
Being lost is okay. Sometimes, being lost is some uncapital g-d’s way of showing we’ve misdirected ourselves. I stole this line from my literary arts workshop. My garden back home is a garden of plastic rain gauges, forgotten under an overgrowth of weeds.
Let’s toss away our broken measuring tools into the pantry to grow dusty with disuse. We never throw them away—someday, we’ll return to the same tools, or buy shiny new ones. But today, let’s streak across the Main Green in the warming spring air. Let’s abandon our broken human concepts of success and accept that we are loved because others love us. It’s time to let loose and grieve and mourn and believe things are because they are. I’m lying on a striped picnic blanket, and the sun is warming the small of my back. Do you feel it too?
