One Day's Lifetime

The rain begins to fall, softly, subtly—warm, bright accents diffusing the deep, full color of thunder, painted on the tapestry of our hearing. Stepping out into the galaxy of winged dew, clasping hands, our first steps are unsure, explorative, a testing of our skin and our hearts. Small shivers playfully chastise us for our reckless steps, but they are left behind and easily forgotten, thrown aside and dissolved by our all-conquering smiles.
We walk slowly at first, without destination and without need, just us two, alone among the crowd of the tiny, softly laughing children of the clouds.
Two old men watch us from a porch, hiding just within the shadows of their man-made arbor, cheerfully laughing along with the rain, but they with us, and at the years they have watched from our eyes, and now return to through them. Ours are years that they can no more return to than our words can stop the steadily growing sheets of rain persistently tucking us into its shining folds. But our road leads us elsewhere, and the watchers are soon left behind.
Soon our clothes, our disguises, become useless, washed through and through by this temporary waterfall ebbing and flowing down upon us. Still, they hold on, clinging to us as we cling to meaning, to each other, none of us willing to risk letting go, none of us needing to. And they, a dripping, shivering skin of cloth, can no more protect you from the sighs of wind than I, a sliver-shield of loyal yet imperfect affection, can protect you from the coldest wind of all: the inevitable moments of heartache.
Yet it is not for us to live those moments, but to pass them, to better them, to crush them with a laugh. For we are held in hands stronger than their small, withering appendages; hands that split galaxies and paint the cheeks of small children; hands that gave us to each other.
And, as the grip of sadness must, the clouds, too, relax their grip on the sky and move on. For some time their unfurled sails of gray satin, now orange tinted by a marmalade sun, peek at us from above the horizon. We return home from our neighborhood swim still smiling; I at you, and you at me. And as the smell of evaporating rain rises back to the softening sky, we reluctantly unclasp our long-shared hands, and find the insides dry-- a perfect, fragile haven from the afternoon storm.