4:56AM

You’re reading A Fable, a lesson in failure, which proves the point and asks the question at the same time, opposite moralities being the point, what it means being the question, when the rain begins to tap lightly against the metal roof. Shutting the single window you opened a half hour prior, you look out beyond the screened blackness at the only slightly varying dark shapes, pitch black/pale black/gray black, visible in the light casted from the kitchen. It’s been so dry for so long now that the rain, losing its familiarity, pushes into the surreal, as if you’re standing within Golconda and it might be suits and bowlers and bodies softly crashing above you. You plunge the coffee you poured before the rain started, the aeropress steaming and hissing as it depressurizes, and the small pool of black coffee almost a mirror underneath the lonely light at shelf’s bottom. In it you see yourself, at least the self that other’s see, which is only vaguely recognizable to you. There, darkly portraited in the that small black pool, is the one person you can’t rid yourself of, though you used to try, didn’t you? Was it raining then too? That October, when you wrote it all down in a notebook, walked up the stairs, after vowing to never make the return trip back down to the bottom. It must have been raining, a detail that seemed insignificant at the time, but now is memory’s catalyst, recalling, pulling you back into that moment. You were shaking, the barrel indenting your flesh, hoping this magician’s wand could wave and make it all disappear. But you failed at that too, finally dropping it beside you, prone and broken and weeping on the harsh wooden floor, unaware that instant could, no would, metastasize into something larger than simply another failure, as you closed your eyes and wished you were braver or more resolute or whatever it was that made failure no longer an option. It’s the reflection you see when your eyes open, in the small black pool, contained within the cup you’ve been pouring coffee into without realizing you were. Convinced now more than ever that failure is needed, like rain after a drought, it softens what was once too hard, too brittle, and makes it malleable again, makes it so you can shape it to whatever it is you desire, allowing for changes as that desire often does. And as the cup warms your hands, the rain still pinging against the roof above you, harder now, steady in a way which it hasn’t in such a long time, because it’s been so dry for so long now, both proving the point and still asking the question, you walk across the room, toward the light, passing the stairs you vowed never to walk back down again, but you have, and you will, sitting down now, having eclipsed the circle behind your head, the warm liquid dissolving the memory caught in your throat, waiting for the first hint of daylight to crack through, reading: “It was not for an outrage that they grieved, but for simple grief: the only alternative to which was nothing, and between grief and nothing only the coward takes nothing.”