Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings Page A

play button.
    She shows up with coffees in the midmorning. She is quiet and just hugs me for a while and smokes. Feeling embarrassed, I sip the black coffee and avoid her eyes, squinting through the screen at the already hot day. But as she watches my profile I can tell that she’s worried. With her, “worry” isn’t quite the right word, of course. She doesn’t think I’ll do anything too terribly self-destructive. It’s just empathy: pain at seeing me hurt, concern about what is going on inside.
    Then she says:
    Let’s get you out of that apartment.
    At the complex, she leaves me in the car while she knocks on the door and, somehow, convinces Samar to go across the parking lot to a neighbor’s place.
    I’m on my knees on the dirty carpet, swiping CDs, looking around at the cramped apartment, inextricable lives festooned and cluttered. But Serala’s a storm of motion, whirling through the place, finding masking tape and rubber bands and by luck or instinct little cardboard boxes, stopping only to touch a match to another smoke and once to put Mississippi John Hurt on the stereo, loud. It’s less than twenty minutes before she has things boxed and bagged, labeled and dated, and piled at the door, all the while checking to make sure Samar isn’t on her way back.
    As we are about to gather the last of my minimal belongings, Serala closes the door on the bleach of California sun and turns me by my arms to face her. She massages my shoulders like a manager does his boxer; she smiles big and though it is forced, it isn’t fake.
    You ready, champ?
She asks, switching one palm to my cheek. I swallow the tears and nod.
We don’t have all day, you know—there’s drinking to do!
    And we put on our shades and fill our arms and walk out.
    As we pull away, I allow myself a glance at Samar, standing across the parking lot, arms folded, in her pose, glaring—but not with the heat I’d expected.
    Through the latter years’ prism of antidepressants, forays into talk therapy, and a several-year dedication to meditation, I can say that the way Serala engaged the chaotic and dangerous sadness that reared up in me was not orthodox, nor solution-based. She never said to me,
You know, Eli, your behavior is really self-destructive and you should consider talking to someone.
From a psycho-medical point of view, particularly for someone who had already fenced with legions of shrinks and swallowed dozens of trial medications, Serala was decidedly silent on the topic of “treatment,” possibly because she had already ceased to believe in a biochemical explanation of her own hurt—and possibly because she did not want a “solution” to her own hurt. She never said so plainly but maybe she didn’t even believe in medical explanations for sorrow and rage. And that’s not what I needed then, that no-nonsense but delicate talk about “getting help” that anyone might have sat me down for.
    I think she saw in me a social and spiritual ailment that she related to far too well and this identification was one of the great comforts of my life, nothing less. She shined this light in my face. There was no reason for how blue I got. I was a healthy, intelligent, well-loved, privileged white man in America and I was merely drowning; it was fucking banal. The more accounts of American-bankrolled genocide in Central America that I read, the more I learned about how deeply my own complicity in the bloodiness of American imperialism ran, the more ruptured my sleep became, the tighter my chest constricted, the quicker I was to useless acts and statements of rage. It was the process of learning that my privilege and comfort comes at a grave cost that others pay. Perhaps the root of my blues has always been biochemical, but if so, the political education I was receiving and the appalling leisure that I, and everyone around me, was living worsened the chemical