Catharsis

Bent and resting on covered crossed arms, she pressed her cherub face
close to the window-opening to feel the rain.  To smell its risp, dank
dirtiness falling to cleanse the earth and shrubbery below the second
floor.  Tiny fragments of raindrops spattered onto her jacket and her
softly flushed cheeks.  Each speck sending a tingle down her robust
spine and making her chocolate mink stole colored eyes flutter
unnaturally.  She let her eyes wander, giving them a rest from the social
confines that keep people from truly examining reality.  The tall, thin
leafed shrubs below gathered no water.  There were no refreshing,
sparkling, magnifying drops settling on the variegated collection of
leafs.  Each grasslike blade was wet, slick to the touch she thought,
though she dared not disturb their time of catharsis.  No sun shone to
make them glisten.  No heavenly rays to given them life only the water
to wash away -- everything.  Leaving  them clean and bare, naked and
vulnerable, dancing beneath the clear spattering drops. A soft rhythm
patted out just below that window.  Each element of tree or bush or
building or bug sending the rain in a different direction.  Adding to and
altering the sound into not just rhythmic rain but the tattered pulse at
lifes creamy skinned throat. At the spot where kisses felt the sweetest. 

The rain would last all day, and the bodies silently filling the room
behind her echoed this hypothesis.  Each lost in their own world
shuffling to seats and staring around oblivious to the presence of
anything.  So separate from the person to their left or right -- thinking
of alternate routes home or how to keep their books dry on the way to
their next class.  Reality had settled upon them,  and they, in turn, had
settled like grim nesting birds of every different sort. Multi-colored
umbrellas and rain slickers provided some break in the grey sky that
hung in the room, hovering, just above the rows of metal-plate ribbed
fluorescent lights.  Her back was still turned to them as a dull hum
flowered at the far back corner of the room.  She felt herself, her space
in that particular place and time.  Then she realized that her ass must be
sticking straight out from the position she stood in.  Her curvaceous
apple bottom sugary sweet and ripe for the picking; threatening and
teasing and seducing all at once. Her imagination  worked overtime
analyzing the way her back was bent, her rounded yet stable shoulders,
her very curvy sexually thrust-out bottom beckoning to be touched. 
But today was not a day for touching. It was a dreary drippy day to be
alone to re-evaluate the shoes you chose that morning or contemplate
the essence of a poem in your head.  It was a philosophers day -- dark
but not pitch black, raining but not a hurricane, chilly but not
bone-aching cold.  Crisp like stale potato chips -- crisp in the center of
dampness.  She sighed, not an audible breath but she felt it.  Her ribs
stretching out as the damp air filled her lungs.  She could feel the cool
moisteness coating her skin like the feeling when you wake up early
from a long summers night that had no air conditioning.  Again she
sighed, and the room sighed with her.

The previous class had been dismissed twenty minutes early, so there
was plenty of time to slow down, not stop, and think.  She leaned her
head slowly to the left watching the wet dripples struggling to hold
onto the black metal window frame. They fell aimlessly, one by one,
into a perilous fatal adventure to be recycled for another rainy day.  She
felt her ear pressed against her jacket.  The black polyurethane warming
to her own bodys temperature.  The wind in the room sounded more
alive when she stood this way.  All of the moist particles were trapped
against her shoulder, and she could hear the steady i..n.. and o..u..t.. of
her own breath.  Maybe her breath stirred the cauldron of air that the
other students floated in.  Or maybe she was just another ghostly vessel
upon its tempestuous sea.  Her eyes blinked slowly, and she was often
caught in a complete daze, letting her stare come naturally so as not to
be painful.  She watched the water below gathering in deep pools filled
with sand and stones and tiny black specks of grassy trash.  There  must
have been a breeze down there that her hot body could not feel. 
Beneath her, the center of the campus was flooded, and each puddle
seemed to be moving with an unseen forces internal vibration.  Row
upon wrinkling, disjointed row of puddle ripples traveled in each
flooded section.  They all wiggled in sync, traveling to the edge --
testing the boundaries of the combination of one hydrogen and two
oxygen atoms.  Each thin ripple made its journey to the edge only to be
swallowed up, re-sorted, and sent out again following the others on this
philosophical pilgrimage.

She shifted her weight onto her right foot feeling the heel of her black
boots testing the steadiness of the floor.  Finding it reasonably safe, her
hips shifted and realigned taking on another provocative pose for an
uninterested audience.  She peered upwards now through the glass of
the push-out window.  The drops fell more slowly taking their sweet
time to travel down the window's pane.  Everything seemed so slow
and methodical.  Like watching an 8mm movie, jerky and breathless
between the scenes.  The world moved and yet did not.  Things were
not following the rigid tick of her black and silver watch, but instead,
they were being guided by the wrinkle-smooth Hand of Time.  Tiny
fingers, no, slivers of fingers, sneaked from one area to another sending
the natural world on its way... giving it all purpose.  Today, she felt the
purpose.  She released herself into the freefall of trust. She trusted
herself, and even as these words came to her, she saw how strong she
could actually be.  Her eyes closed in a comfortable half-daze,
half-sleep.  She breathed deeply and could detect the highly pied scents
all around.  The wet grass and the dirt that smelled like an earthworm
souffl�.  Her own body, her clothes still wet from a walk in the rain,
smelling of lightning struck ozone and musky sexuality.  The women
around her all carried the same tantalizing aromas, but most were
ashamed to laxen the clamp of their knees and let their womanhood
openly but sweetly, cinnamon-sugary, declare their sex.  

She inhaled deeply searching for newness, for warmth or connection
among the separated mass.  Her senses detected a silvery smell.  A
freshly spun web of oneness eeked into the room.  She turned her head
sharply and noticed the class was almost filled.  All the players had
arrived, each going over their role before the performance began.  She
did not stir.  Her black boots smelled of the earthworm souffl�, and she
was not one of the players that sat so dutifully behind her.  Maybe the
day or the rain kept the web from entangling her ankles and dragging
her into the gelatin stable group.  Maybe she was just clinging to the
edge to watch it collapse from within which was inevitable.  Maybe she
was of a different sort.  She was pushed by the slept-in-satin-bed-feeling 
Hand of Time, so gentle and firm pressing on the small of her back.  
It cradled her body and thrust her appropriately forward.  The watch 
ticking on her wrist, the fearfully sexual women of the room, the rainy 
un-wet leaves all spoke to her in unison.  She adored her body; she felt 
her self.  She was not the person that had to exist in a social context... 
she was herself.  That is all she wanted to be and needed to be.

Her hands moved slowly pushed by reality to her left wrist.  Before her 
eyes had time to focus properly she removed her watch, tossed it roughly 
from the window, and watched it sliver into hundreds of metal pieces in 
the bosom of the earth.  She sighed again, a complete sigh, and the 
universe sighed with her.  She felt Mother Natures arms embracing her 
ample feminine body.  Her heart pounded, a civil war drum beating against 
her leathery breast bone.  Her pulse was visible just above the smooth 
skin slickly encasing her collarbone.  Her pupils were expanded to their 
complete fullness, her eyes going from chocolate brown to prowling 
tigress black.  She pushed the window open wide..... looked down to 
where the watch had fallen to its bursting destruction and she 
pushed her hands out.  The rain felt stingingly cold on her fingertips, 
and she was washed clean and bare, naked and vulnerable.  
She danced beneath the clear spattering drops.