Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings Page B

blue considerably.
    Serala made me feel sane and right for hurting, instead of weak, disturbed, melodramatic, and lonely. It was massively comforting to realize that there was someone else in my life that was also laid low by how wrong the world is. Much of my fear bloomed and much of my sadness permutated from watching people waltz through a deteriorating planet and a cutthroat world with shit-eating grins, including many right at my side who were learning about the same horror and injustice. And so I’d felt crazy at times for my incapacity to wear one of those grins consistently, too.
    She gave me reason for my pain, sometimes on note cards secreted in my backpack.
    We exist amid people doing horrible shit to each other, Eli, and some people can deflect it all. You and I can ignore it, but we can’t keep it out of us. It seeps in just like the air out here—and just like the sweet does when we’re driving and laughing, too, or listening to Bruce [Springsteen] and drinking something good. It does work both ways, it’s just that there’s a lot more shit on the whole, love.
    I’d stayed with Samar as long as I had—despite the near-violence, the jealousy, the toxicity of our match—because I felt guilty. I was terrified of what would happen if I pulled the trigger: afraid, primarily, that she would hurt herself, either deliberately or unconsciously. And so I chose the path of least resistance and stayed. Suffered, and boiled, and worsened the blackness that was metastasizing in my head and my soul during that time. Again, Serala never had to say it plainly, and if she had, I probably wouldn’t have heard it. She said it by action, by ushering me to that apartment to empty it and welcoming me to her space instead:
The hard road is often the right one, and, moreover, the kindest thing you can do for Samar is to leave
. It wasn’t a lesson that stuck, sadly, but it was a lesson that freed me from a relationship that might well have been the final ingredient in a volatile emotional cocktail.

Seven
    In the house I moved into, plastic flapped over broken windows and mysterious roommates had pornographic sex at dawn on the other side of thin walls. Just when you reached the edge of sleep roaches skittered and stuck you full of the willies. In sum, I might have spent ten nights there during the last six weeks of the semester, what with Serala’s Batcave always open to me.
    It isn’t but a night or two after I’ve “moved” that Serala and Monty and I, all cocked on the cheap booze of a dive bar, stumble back to the Batcave and fall into a heap. Serala is way past done with talk for the night. She slides a Lyle Lovett CD into the stereo and the melody tugs Monty and me quickly toward sleep. I make noises about going home, a slurry promise to stop for a soda to sober up, but she hushes me.
Don’t be stupid
, she says, and that’s it. I don’t know how we all fit, but somehow we three sleep together in her little bed—or Monty and I sleep while Serala watches, most likely. I don’t know when the muted but strong animosity I felt toward Monty melted away (because of what his presence in Serala’s life had meant for Jay). Maybe harmony between us was a condition for both of us of retaining her company so we swallowed the pill. But something else was starting to happen, too—I was starting to soften toward Monty because despite his bluster, his politics, he couldn’t fully hide that he contained a lot of hurt, too.
    Most of those spring nights she left me in her blankets for Monty’s room at 3 a.m. or later. She’d kiss my cheek or slide a hand over my head slowly, then turn and walk out with contrary speed. I’d lie there, missing Samar sharply despite the sneers and silence with which she treated me when we crossed paths on campus, but grateful also for the simple words Serala had spoken, or sometimes put onto paper and left