Drops of rain spot the window. Their journey to this plane, one of velocity and collision, each crashing into another, ballooning and reducing in size as they plummet. Their flight towards the glass all manically choreographed by an unseen wind, not the puppet, but the strings of an incomprehensible atmosphere above and all around. The wind scatters them everywhere and over the last half-hour several hundred have been thrown against this glass. For most, their purchase is only momentary. Some hit and abseil straight to the bottom; others slalom their way via fingerprints, grease marks and fossilised bird shit down to the sill, a horizontal plane that will see them coalesce and be redefined as pools and puddles. Yesterday, the wind was lifting small specks of dust. Just tossing them from one place to another. Little clouds of nothing remarkable; small events that almost passed without notice and which left behind no real sign of ever having happened. The wind picked up leaves too; cartwheeled their ovate forms around a floor of red and brown, which is to say it took a red leaf and placed it where brown once was, and took brown to lay over the top of what was once red. Again: interfering with all that it had the strength to move, yet tampering with so many infinite like shapes and particles that one could not point to the evidence of its having visited. Today, the wind directs things less noticeably, despite what would appear to be a more obvious workload; it has combed the window with rivulets of water which refract red and brown and grey and green beyond the glass one thousand times over. This morning, early, as I sat with my book, but unable to read: a lone mote of dust, sailing by in the first reflected fingers of daylight. Moving and almost not moving. There and almost not there. Almost nothing.
‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.
Beautiful words on the art of seeing, Matt.
Beautiful. Humbling. (Humbling in that if I looked at rain on a window my description would probably be, 'Huh, it's raining.' 😂) Would love a post on your writing process some day.