Dear Caprece
I thought of you
today as I passed the canal on my way home.
It was early evening
but the sun had still managed to suffuse
its rays pass the massive weight of humidity which hung suspended in the air,
depressing down on me. I felt like I had an elephant on my back and I was ready
to jump into the canal.
I was
walking across the bridge when the skies suddenly turned dark. Mind you, this was no Ponte Sisto. Just a loose alignment of crisscrossed wooden
planks. I closed my eyes as a speck of
rain fell on my forehead. Soon the
droplets turned heavy and huge, dampening into my t-shirt. Thunder roared menacingly at me. But I felt strangely nostalgic and took
shelter under a tamarind tree, climbed up to pick out its fruit as I did when I
was younger. The ants from the tamarind
tickled my arms so I flicked them off, let them scurry away from the rain. They look just like the street vendors
folding their fake merchandise as they packed and pulled plastic bags over
their heads. A vendor rolls his goods
into one bundle and ties it across his chest.
He scampers into his tiny motor scooter and chugs off. If only he had a Vespa. A beggar is sitting on top of a sewage line
across from me. He watches the chaotic
scene, laughs, showing his blackened gums
and teeth from betel nut chewing, but the smile reaches his wrinkled rheumy
eyes.
I sat on the wet
grass, peeling the tamarind, watching the muddy waters of the canal move as
fast as the Tiber, waiting for the rain to die down.
Soon the clouds
calmed, stopped leaking, leaving only a putrid odor of rain soaked garbage; the
trailing stink of ‘tuk tuk’ exhausts, combined with cigarette fumes and a thin
gossamer aroma of noodles.
The rain in Rome
smells strangely like the rain here. Oh
how I miss you so.
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