Prompt: what’s the weather outside your window like right now? alternatively, if that’s not inspiring, what’s your ideal whether like or the weather of somewhere you wish you could be?

The dark curtains are blocking reality, but behind them you can hear it. The rush of the cars, one by one, not the multiples of mid-day, but stranglers from the night before. Early risers and get-this-breaders. People lost and people on their way, people just a ‘in .5 miles, turn slightly right’ away from their beds, or loved ones, or the next 10 hours of their day. The wind, too, is lazy, rolling in and greeting the wild birds and rodents that have been chattering in the trees long before the bows moved with the day’s breath. The mechanical lurch of the public transit’s engines. The reduced amount of human voices, saying what we don’t: ‘it’s still happening’. Cicadas emulating a crowded stadium’s wave. You can hear the planes and the helicopters, not watchers but reporters, trying to help the later rush with their own commutes.

What’s missing is the rain. Where only the night before droplets battered the metal sidings and glass windows, and puddles shimmered in the gutters of the streets, now there was only brightness. Only a single sun beaming down, not yet with the heat of an exhausted midday worker but sweetly reducing the wet glimmer of the night before to a matte finish on the concrete. Drying the parked cars to a new shine, despite the pollen and feces adorning their enamel. You can’t see them behind the curtains but clouds might be out too, fluffy and filled with the promise of a future downpour, or wispy and new, just starting to get their bearings in the sky cycle.