It’s dumping down outside, mazes of pockmarked rainwater running everywhere on the ground. My life is made up of memories—this shirt I got from a different place, reminding me of this person—every piece of clothing on my body is linked indelibly to a given impression left on me by a friend, a lover, an acquaintance, an experience. My life is a ship sailing on into the seas of time yet to come and I am a patchwork of tar and lumber, each board set in place by a different sailor with his own motives and mode of action.

Outside it rains down, running in mazes, and sometimes the wind blows hard, bringing it down in sweeping curtains belting across the ground.

When the winds blow, my experiences sweep across me too, rippling through the surface and superseding the patterns and channels of thought that had been operational in me moments earlier. For just a little bit there is nothing else, and I get washed away in what has been.

Just as suddenly as it came on it stops, and there I stand in control, in the present moment again. I check myself and regain my bearings; the reverie is over.

In the next necessary event in the course of things I will step outside back into the rain again, and in spite of all the wetness and the immersion of memory I will be in control again, navigating my way through the chaos that is the gestalt of all my life experiences. And in future times, unimaginable in the now, the sun will re-emerge and bring me into stark selfconscious clarity and self-awareness—maybe in that instant an unobscured path will appear, and I will know—but for now, back I go laughing into the joyful embrace, the wetness of the storm.