Downpour

It’s going to rain.

Of course it’s going to rain.

As has occurred every afternoon since the exchange student arrived in the small European city, that morning’s warm breeze has been chased away by the cold, blustery winds which herald the evening storm. The afternoon rains, usually a gentle (if uncomfortably chilly) affair, arrive every day so precisely at 4.10 PM that you can set your clock by them.

As he does most afternoons after his last class, the exchange student decides to go for a walk. He knows the squall is coming, of course. It comes every day. But every day, after standing up from his desk, he nevertheless decides to drop off his bag, put on his raincoat and walk. He tells himself that he just needs to stretch his legs, that besides, the rain isn’t that bad.

What he will not admit, not even to himself, is that the rain is the point. The cloudy drizzle, which darkens the sky as the day turns to dusk, which makes pedestrians put their heads down and stride quickly to their destinations, which draws tendrils of steam from the brick roads, filling the narrow alleyways of the old city with an opaque mist, is precisely what draws him outside as the grey clouds begin to gather. He himself cannot see that he longs to disappear, to fade into the background, to have his body go unnoticed. The evening storm provides the cover he desires; the light prick of rain on his neck is one of the few things that penetrates the thick glass wall which boxes him in, forcing him to observe from a distance all that he feels and experiences.

As always oblivious to his own true motivations, he sets out towards the heart of the city. The rain starts gentle at 4.10 on the dot, but soon turns torrential. As it turns out, on this afternoon, the winds over the Mediterranean and a particularly spirited butterfly have conspired to deliver onto the city a more ferocious storm than usual. The deluge soaks through the exchange student’s rain jacket and dampens the thicket of black fur which seems to every day grow to cover more of his body.

Growing cold, he turns and attempts to make his way back to the apartment, but somewhere among the twisted roads of the old city, he must have taken a wrong turn, because he finds himself hopelessly, totally lost.

He is thoroughly soaked. Shivering. He determines that he needs a place wait out the storm. He looks around and finds himself in a largely residential district. There’s only one shop nearby, bedraggled but open in spite of the rain. From the outside it looks to be some sort of antique shop.

Stepping inside, to a slight chime, the exchange student confirms his initial assessment. He is surrounded by objects of unknown provenience and use. A short, older woman comes bustling to the front, asking, in the local language, what he would like. Haltingly, he informs her that he is just browsing. She switches to fluent, albeit heavily accented English, and tells him that he seems like a person who is searching for some kind of change.

His heart hammers in his chest, but he only smiles and demurs.

Ignoring his protestations, she disappears into the back of the store, and returns with a small, light pink, ceramic bottle. She informs him that it is shampoo, no longer sold in stores. None of the modern stuff works as well as this does. He should try it. She insists. Especially in the bottle, which is antique. Nobody knows where it comes from. Perhaps together, they will make the change he is looking for.

He sighs and reaches into his pocket. He tells himself that if he buys it, maybe she will stop pestering him, and he can stay quietly until storm passes. She says she’s giving it to him for a discount. Only twenty euro. He gives her a bill. She pockets it.

(The bottle, of course, costs two euro at the home goods store she shops at and is filled with the cheapest shampoo she’s can buy. A savvy buyer would know this, but she’s very good at recognizing the young men with the sad eyes who will ask few questions and buy the concoction regardless of the price she offers.)

The exchange student, of course, does not know this. If he did, he wouldn’t have made the purchase. There would be no thrumming in his head. No crack in the barrier in his mind. But he does not know, so he clutches the cheap bottle of cheaper soap to his chest and thanks the shopkeeper. He spends the next hour browsing useless tchotchkes feeling… something, which is more than nothing.

The storm clears before the last dregs of light fade from the sky, and the exchange student finds his way back to the apartment. He was closer than he thought. He opens the bottle and smells. The shampoo smells like strawberries and the ocean. Taking his towel, he walks down the hall to the bathroom.

He sniffs the bottle again with trepidation, or something that is not quite trepidation, but looks much like trepidation to all but the best trained eye. That is to say, to our exchange student’s, whose inner eye is indeed untrained, the emotion he experiences as he smells the fruity aroma whenever he brings his nose towards the mouth of the small pink bottle seems to be trepidation.

Were someone else in the room, someone who has, through many years of experience, come to know and understand the particular suite of emotions that the exchange student is both totally unaware of and deeply, achingly familiar with, it might look like something else.

It might look like desire.

Alas, there is no such person in the cramped bathroom in small, university-assigned apartment of the exchange student, so the emotion goes, as so many do, misidentified.

He strips.

Gets in the shower.

Soaks his hair. Shakes a blob of the shampoo in his hand. He rubs in in, noting as he does the uncomfortable prickle of the short hair on the back of his neck.

The smell relaxes him. He doesn’t quite know why. He lets his mind drift, feeling the steam and heat and the nice-smelling suds. Everything feels fuzzy…

And then he notices the last soapy bubbles swirling around and into the drain. The crystalline barrier, which had been moments before filled with cracks, wholly repairs itself in an instant, but does nothing to dampen the shock as he is thrust suddenly, painfully, back into himself. His hair feels nice and clean. It smells good too.

He sinks to the ground, and stays in the shower for a long while, the warm water hitting his face then running down his all-too-present body.