I don't know what I was thinking, or if I was. I barely remember waking, because it could hardly have been considered sleep. I heard the rain outside when I arose, still I left the house without a raincoat or jacket, without my rain boots. It was as I crossed the Petaluma river, watching the bright lights of a barge move upstream from the bay in the rain, as it navigated its way through the break in the old lift bridge to the east that it struck me, the raincoat draped across the chair near the door, the rain boots dry by the bed. All of it, lost in the mist of morning.
Pre-dawn is doubly dark in the rain under the clouds which can't be seen except when lit from underneath, near pockets of people, strip malls or a clutch of houses along the roadside. The littlest of passing lights are doubled as droplets in puddles, the oncoming reflections moving, dancing and disappearing as a dangerous drug made of only water and darkness. It is not a safe place for a still sleeping mind, careening across the thin surface of the water that should be road at eighty miles an hour or more, dreaming of or sliding away from sleep.
.
