I sat cradling a cup of warm coffee between my palms as droplets pattered on the windowsill beside me. Every so often a single droplet would be led astray and reach for my coffee, making me smile unconsciously. There has always been something about the rain that intensifies human emotion. On that particular evening I sat ruminating in the quiet joys of my life. It was hard for me to accept that I could be a happy adult, that I could find the hustle of the world around me endearing. I outwardly hated it but I had no qualms about the way my life was turning out particularly.

Do not misunderstand, reader. I was not a happy individual per se, but one with no troubles I could not handle. Moreover, the motivation to go looking for problems and to dig up old melancholy had vanished from my existence. I attributed this to my age. Perhaps it was upsetting, how the vigor one had for life could dissipate when one hadn’t even covered a quarter of it. But I had found a way that worked for me and it gave me an odd thrill to be satisfied in a world that functioned on lack. It was due to this nature of mine that I had ended up molding that made me like the rain even though I did not adore it as some do, romanticizing the very notion of it. I had simply accepted it and now I had begun to enjoy the experience.

I lived for such quiet evenings, ones where I made little to no sound and simply existed as an ear for the world. It reminded me of a poem of mammothic proportions, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Whitman considered it a joy and a worthy use of one’s time to fade into the background in order to hear the sounds of his surroundings. While I did not share his endurance, that of a poet and an artist, I found this act to be worthy of the time of a human. As a leaf of grass, what was the purpose of a temporal life, if not to be here in the present and green? These were the thoughts that I shared with myself, and now I share with you, as I emptied my cup of that black liquid and returned to the company of others.