Glittering Darling of the Troposphere by Heath Carra

Remember our glory days when the world was fresh with possibility? It was a springtime of the spirit. In fact, it was spring. You and I were just two drops of rain, and we felt like we could fall forever. The world was our sky and the sky was our world. Everything was new and bright as we chased each other through the breeze. It was just you, me, and gravity. And like the trillions of other drops, we felt special—like no one had ever felt this way before. 

And then the ground came. 

When we collided with solid reality, I lost you in the tumble. It was a whole new world, dangerous and strange and full of bristles. We got mixed up with strangers, and we dripped to the forest floor. After the triumph of raining, dripping was an insult. We dripped and soaked and saturated. I saturated alone, without you. 

Swept down through the crowds, rushing for the water table, I kept wondering where you were. Were you in some brook burbling away from me? Or maybe held hostage by some thievish root? 

The sky was just a wisp of a dream as I permeated down, and darkness and pressure became my everything. Life underground plays funny tricks on the mind. You forget there could be anything else, but I never forgot about you.  

Those days of inching through the earth were the hardest days of my cycle. Hard like stone. It was stone—mazes of stone, and everyone in a hurry. I was in a hurry, too. We pressed and shoved and fought through every crack, each of us desperate, thirsting for freedom. But could I really be free without you?  

Then, one day, I was unexpectedly flowing. All of us floundering together like amnesiacs on the subway, hurtling toward some destiny none of us could understand. But as sunlight flashed through the multitudes, I thought I saw you. You, my glittering darling of the troposphere. Was that you? A blurred face in the rushing crowd. 

Over cliffs, we were free again and, briefly we rained, but none of the droplets were you. We sank to slow, gloomy depths, and though the lakes and the fjords and the seas were deep, they seemed empty without you. Places of lamentation and nostalgia. Your sparkle would break all the lonely hearts in that abyss. 

But time is a roiling current. It turned the darkness inside out, and one morning, I was at the surface again. I was tossed from waves, whipped with the wind into the sky. All the weight of the world was gone. I was thin as vapour. Ethereal. Incorporeal. 

The sunlight streamed into me. The sky breathed me in. And then, remarkably, implausibly, you were there in the churn of clouds, looking right at me. All the darkness that had passed between us made you shine so bright in my famished eyes. 

Here with me now, you scintillate in the cold morning air. Holding onto one another, we crystallize in ecstasy and precipitate out of this bright winter sky. But this time, we’ll savour every moment as we dance toward our fates, spinning and falling and whirling in the wind.  

These are our silver days of snow now, our patient days of floating and settling and drifting and sleeping. This time, I won’t let you go. This time, I’ll hold you so tight that we’ll glaciate. This time, I’ll reshape the land. I’ll push over mountains before I let you go again.