Tracks in the Rain

I never hear a song the first time it sings; I wait for the mockingbird's echo.

When it rains, the water writes equations on the window panes. I've tried to figure them out in the car, between the moments I spend cursing the triangle the windscreen wiper never reaches. Simon and Garfunkel whisper across the dashboard, while I tap out tentative fingerprints onto old jeans. The droplets settle back reluctantly after each passing set of wheels.

    Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk to you again.

After the rain, everything smells like grass, and camellias. Infinitely more so than when leaning into the white petals, clinging to the spindly thing on top of the stem that no one knows the name of. Strains of The Beatles ring against my blue walls, each song carrying the memory of other Sunday afternoons spent waiting for the rain to ease. The Live Messenger window glows orange on the double taskbar, beside the homework I pretend to do. Refill lies at near perpendicular angles to the etchings on my desk, which I made a billion years ago.

    Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, and I say, it's alright.

The mist is always hovering some three inches above the ground on Monday morning, walking to school. I spend the first street combing through the knots my earphones have tied themselves into while I slept. I think to load new songs onto my phone every morning, but I never do. The voices are familiar friends by now. The same song is always playing when I pass the traffic light - pretending not to look at the reflection on the window across the road - and the same song plays in my head for the rest of the day.

    Desperado, why don't you come to your senses, you've been out riding      fences, for so long now.

Evening, wet hair drips onto the back of an old tee-shirt. The volume perches on the bar just above nothing. I cannot really hear the chords that play, only the irregular stop and start of the shower two doors over and the cooking show that runs for two minutes before the six o clock news.

    Fifteen there's still time for you, time to buy and time to lose. Fifteen, there's  never a wish better than this, when you've only got a hundred years to live.

Dad listens to the same seven songs when he does the dishes. He hums along on isolated lines, breaking into song every twenty words or so. I know mum can start crying if she watches him from the shadow before the doorway. It's been those seven songs for a long time now.

    And though time goes by, I will always be, in a club with you, in 1973.

    Singing "Here We Go Again".

Between sheets that smell like washing powder and sun, I listen to the wind chime.

It is never, ever the same.