As much as I hated the rain on Monday, there's one thing I do enjoy about rainy days - the day afterwards. The rain cleans all the haze out of the air, and the skies are clear. On my drive in on Tuesday, downtown KC sparkled in the distance, crystal-clear on the horizon. No foul brown smog in the air to dull it. At night, the sky was still haze-free, and the stars were beautiful.
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People seem to disappear from our apartment complex, but not in an abduction/murder kind of way. They just... vanish. One day, there's people living in an apartment, and you get used to always seeing the signs of life -- lights on at night, something on the porch, perhaps spying a piece of furniture through the blinds as you walk by. Then, one day you walk by the apartment again and there's nothing there but an empty set of rooms and a bare balcony. I don't know who the people are, and yet my world seems just a shade emptier now that they're gone. Of course, someone else will fill the apartment for a while, as always happens, but they'll disappear too. Eventually, even we'll vanish, and someone will walk by our old apartment and wonder what happened to the people who were there before.
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The thespian in me wonders about the little dramas that take place in the lives of life's extras - the people that we pass in the mall or on the highway or on the street, the ones we never interact with. I wonder what histories, comedies, and tragedies fill their lives. I wonder if they wonder about everyone else.
