It’s just after nine and I ‘m lying on the bed.

Screens are flickering all around me.

Laptop, television, iPhone.

I am listless, submissively consuming all manner of media without any sort of participation or intellectual collaboration. It’s like I’m undergoing a medical procedure, receiving some bizarre content infusion. The air filter and air conditioner rattle along, and I am amazed at my distance from the world as it is, how much I ache for the actual.

Days, weeks, wheeling through the anesthetizing smog of this digital limbo we inhabit. This realm, so lacking in substantive, nutritious contact with people, it seems a shield to life rather than offering a new path into it. Nothing is quite real in this Ghost World, everything abstracted, diffuse, fragmented– just the shadows of other lives, beckoning…

This Ghost World, it eats me, wears me like a skin.

Even at night, it is still so hot. Humidity that increases gravity. I check the weather on one of my devices. A thunderstorm is bullying its way through the city right this second. I had no idea.

I love rain. I’ll listen to it on one of those anxiety apps the algorithm keeps planting in my feeds, imaging it cleansing me like baptism. But in this moment I can barely motivate myself to get up from my bed, take the small walk to the living room, and look out the window.

Yet I do.

And outside it is pouring. Sheets of rain.

Small streams are rushing down the sidewalk, down the street, washing away countless minute worlds. How many unknown empires vanishing in these moments, how many renewed?

The world changing before me.

I want to enter into the storm. That catharsis. Getting hopelessly soaked, clothes clinging, bodies taking form like sculpture freed from marble.

Looking at the torrents of rain through the window I almost feel like I am looking out at an aquarium, of being submerged. And I think of of skinny-dipping in a deep, dark lake at night– ridges of trees in the distance. An act that is both a becoming and un-becoming at the same time. Our flesh goose-pimpled and taut, each person glowing moon pale, like a living star in the quiet waters.

But I am not there. I am in my housecoat, and I know I am not going to run out into the storm, and I wonder if I’m ever going to do that again. We never really know when we’ve done something for the last time, do we?

As I’m thinking this, a car pulls up. Sits for a bit while the storm pounds, the rain illuminated by the headlights. I am a secret in the dark interior, watching. A leg kicks open one of the doors and a young man gets out. He is immediately drenched, and is instantly a more honest version of himself. Laughing he beckons his girlfriend out, and the two of them, holding hands, run toward their apartment. They are impossibly beautiful, impossibly perfect in this moment. Beaming, they are nothing but light, and when they vanish inside I can still see their outlines– like phosphorescence suspended in the darkness.