Blue Skies

The weather is full of unfulfilled promises.

Would that bad things only happened when the weather is stark and grey and dreary. Would that every heartbreak be acknowledged by the sudden downpouring of rain. Would that every agony of mankind be reflected by the weather, such that the sky became forever turgid with the endless suffering of humanity.

Nothing is as depressing to me as a sunny day and a blue sky.

We are supposed to relish the sunlight. When flowers bloom and seedlings pop their ignorant heads above the soil. Sunny days are here again, they say, and people drink and dance. This is the world—so warm and shining and brilliant. This is happiness: a child sitting with a melting ice-cream in a cone, a dog cheerfully bounding across a sea of grass with a stick in its mouth.

But tragedy is not afraid of the sun, or the flowers, or the misbegotten optimism of the sun-worshippers in their temples. Tragedy occurs no matter the weather.

The weather is unflinching. It does not care. The bumblebee picks at the heart of a flower, gathering pollen. A child sits, crying, with a melting ice-cream in a cone; a stick remains in the grass because there is no dog to fetch it.

These are the unspoken agonies of every sunny day. This is a funeral procession without dark clouds to accompany it. This is the horrible, horrendous blue sky.

For me, that vast blue nothing does not conjure hope, or calm, or peace. Rather it is a vast, unbounded horror. And the sun on the leaves. And the sun on the cement. And the smells in the air.

Ah, such beautiful tapestry does the sun weave. And yet the soldiers still march. Bombs still explode. And in a room somewhere that the light does not reach a hand touches another hand—leathery now, close to death now, and another life slips away.

And it is sunny outside. And people are cheerful and rambunctious. And they raise toasts to the idiot glorification of a sun that persists even when it is cloudy, an ever-explosion of nuclear light in the sky that blinds our eyes and brands our skin.

I hate it. Let the sky pour with the rain of our tears. Let the heavens lament all that we have lost. Let the ground rumble with the articulation of our collective rage.

In the cold and the wet and the grey.

In the pounding of the rain and the cold bite of the wind.

There, I find solace.