It is a day italicized by infinite droplets of water. Tinted car windows on gray streets crowd a concrete city blanketed in diffused light, accented by streaks of red reflections in wet asphalt. I wear dark glasses to hide my eyes, hide my intentions, and hide my whereabouts. My outfit is all leather, shiny and black. I am racing through rain that means as much to me as the laws of physics, that is: nothing. I am framed reaching through the rain at a Dutch angle, camera tilted to fit long legs. Of course, I am moving. The rain is moving. My slicked back hair is the only thing that must be perfectly still.
In another story, in another city, in a small house on the corner of Main Street and 22nd, a door opens and a little girl steps out. My relationship to her is that our frames are side by side, nothing more. The rain is tip, tip, tapping out of a broken gutter above the porch. The girl clumsily unwraps an umbrella, one of the small ones that can fit in your purse. I wince at how long it takes her to remember where the button is that pops the wire frame of the umbrella free. When it springs forth with a whump! she shakily arranges it above her and marches out from the dry overhang of the doorway of her house. She was already a figure that invoked horizontal, with a wide face, a pink backpack stuffed outwards, frizzy hair stretching out past her ears, stocky legs and frog-green rain boots. The shallow arc of the umbrella exaggerates her round silhouette. She advances forward, holding the umbrella with both hands, peering outwards with annoyance or uncertainty?
Her rain is not a rain of uncountable droplets, like mine. It is a rain falling in sheets. It is the type of rain that feels like a gif, looping over and over in a predictable pattern. The air smells like wet grass and damp earth. Her street is empty except for the pattering of rain and the occasional dog bark. Her frame fades from my interest. In the rain, she is merely clogging through puddles stolidly, and she will be for a while. But in the same rain, I am full of action, I am pulling out guns as shiny as my tank top. In scenes of advancing tension, I am setting the guns on a glass table with a satisfying noise somewhere between a click and clunk. The connection between us isn’t the rain, that’s for sure. I am saving the world, she is living in it.