City Lighted Rain

There is a certain magic to Albuquerque after the sun goes down and the gentle rain begins to fall. The people on the streets, dashing from cars to shop doors beneath newspapers. The girl in Knob Hill who stands unprotected in her leather jacket staring up into the drops. Lights playing in the warm water, as the streets are slicked and washed. That smell of a rained on city rises through the open car windows, as the windshield wipers batter the rivulets for dominance of the glass. The car rushes past. Everything is standing still in the rain, and moving, dirty and washed clean. Nothing on those streets is captive, it is alive and rich with temporality.
Exposed by darkness what is hidden by reflection in day, everything is lost in the revelation nightfall. Every secret exposed is in turn cleaned by the rain. Where the wheels touch the street, they are washed clean, as the asphalt of the cars passing. Each footstep is amnesia. The calls and cries of a city whipping by the windows to become lost in the rain, laughter that cannot be hoarded.

In the cold and the dry, years later, I will wish for this. I will finally realize how much it meant to me. The absence of place and self, irrelevance of care. Bathed in the city lights and washed clean by rain, my own simplicity was a contrast and compliment to those moments of strangers laughter and rain washed shrieking.
But now, I drive and am washed away. If only the sun would set deeper and harder, and the warm summer rain would never stop. If only that, then the road would go on forever, in the laughter of women bathed in city lighted rain.