Have you ever seen a window on a rainy day? From the inside, I mean. When the rain is nothing but an external hum, and the chill is but a wisp of a lingering scent. And you look out the window, with its viscous beads perspiring against the stony glass. Wavering, shivering with the distant cold, displaced by its ever-falling companions. You watch them tremble, desperate to steady its grip against an unfeeling universe, sliding down with squeaky hesitance, then with the smooth, resigned release of a marble down a pane. You watch them fall, slip against the glass in skewed descent, faster and faster, until they disappear below the awning, the window shelf, a plastic shelf, a rimmed frame. They are quickly and thoughtlessly replaced.

Behind them trails the chasing slivers of watery tear-tracks, a faint remnant of a shuddered passing, quickly erased by a new star, falling, falling, a slightness of life whispered and urged on by sibylline breaths of wind. All the same, after all, these streaking, trailing glimmers, pulsing, never able to cling on to its existence for very long, before it splashes, forgotten, shattered and faded on the slickened asphalt below.