Notes after Rain

There was rain this morning, as I was walking to work. I was watching patches of sunlight on the ground, shimmering and cut by branch-shadows cast from the trees that lined the road, when I felt the first needle-surprise of a rain drop. Long, thin and sharp, it felt yellow on my face, -sunlight turned to liquid and quickly cooling. As I left the breached shelter of the trees I watched the rain turn heavier. It was a spring rain though, warm and young and hopeful. It tasted of cathedrals and Worcester mornings, my first spring time in Brighton, walking the dusty parallels of streets back from Hove after a job interview.

I ended up catching a bus from Tescos. The rain was getting heavier and I would have been soaked. I shared the bus with workers heading into town with the look of the outlying suburbs on their faces; Hangleton and Portslade, Southwick and Aldrington. Places I really only know after nightfall, on one of my meandering weekday walks.

The rain has gone now, and outside the call centre windows, a bright sun shines. I watch the sea under an only slightly blemished sky. There is a very clear 'after-rain' light which has sharpened the angles of everything and deepened the distance. The horizon of the sea - a shifting turquoise colour - seems closer to Europe than England. The light has an autumnal cast to it too, those first few days of that shift - gold September afternoons in cooling fields, watching the sky deepen and twist and curve. Deep as a sea, and the clouds floating there like ships made of skulls and birds and faces. A pareidolia season pumped full of simulacra and nostalgia.

I can see the glittering on the sea now, and it seems less like autumn. It gets me thinking of Cornish Coves, thinned-out fishing villages and seagulls looking down from cliff tops. I can't see any seagulls now - though there was a messy flurry of these avian thugs earlier. I can see a man in the stairwell of the hotel opposite. he stands at the glass, holding a balloon that floats above him. I can only see him in silhouette, a clown-shadow, and I look again, and he is gone.

The afternoon now. Lunchtime, spent buying comics and graphic novels from various shops, passed by in a summery haze of streets full of strangers and Easter holidaymakers. The after-rain autumnalism of the morning had gone. That sudden anti-glare of walking from the brightness of Western Road back into the call centre building jarred me. Waiting for the lift, and everything feeling flat and oddly colourless, everything drained away from the inside of things.

Halfway through the afternoon and the morning's autumn has returned. The sun is hidden behind an incidental cloud - the sky is mostly clear, a pale blue fading to white. I watch the shadows of the walkers on the promenade. The shadows seem fluid, pools of some night-essence distilled and velvety, even when cast by the light of a sometime autumnal sun.