American Girls

27 June 2009
American Girls

The nightly rains make my sleep good, my complexion bad and my hair crazy. They bring moisture to parched land and take the women from their homes to prepare the fields. They soak loamy spots and muddy shoes and toes and wake the snakes from their summer slumber. They come lightly, sneak around, make a little noise, like an uninvited guest feeling out the party bringing wine to the hostess in hopes of a free-be and then bam! Party crashed.

They come lightly, uninvited, somewhat expected, and without assurance and the crash and the strike and the scream. Children fear and yell and can only be heard by their bedmates or during the times of building fury. It can be felt, when the silences between clouds screaming takes a bit and it is filled with the shrill of children wailing. The noises, the mixtures of relief from hungry mothers to annoyance of big sisters and tears of small babies, they beacon the rain and ask for a bit of discretion, and are answered with towers of clouds and layers of lightening and pounding rains and green, beautiful pastures, ready for the season.

This compound of emotions and notions and the craze that comes just before everyone seeks shelter can strike some serious fear into American girls. American girls who find themselves alone, curled under a single sheet, too scared to blow out the candle from Korea and wanting a hard-rain-induced sleep to come over them and guide them, slowly and surely into the next day.

Heavy eyelids are no match for fear struck, lightening striking, puddle reflecting, eyeballs and imaginations…

The nightly rains make me more independent and more longing for another… one other. The nightly rains confuse and scare me yet I enjoy them, surviving them, knowing their final result and being able to say I did. I can. American girls, we hide under sheets until we’re able to talk big about how it was just one sheet.