It was with him through each humiliating defeat on the pitcher’s mound. It was with him for every lost kite and every missed kick. It was with him every holiday when he suffered through the loneliness of being the only one in his class to receive no seasonal cheer: no valentines, no Christmas cards, nothing but a sack full of rocks on Halloween. It was with him when his dog shunned him for the entertainment of its own inner life, barely noticing him at all until it was time for supper. It was with him when he paid his meager allowance to a neighborhood bully for advice that was invariably insulting.

It was there every time the little red-headed girl saw him make a fool of himself, every time she didn’t see him at all.

It was there, eating it all up… drinking down every last drop of depression and despair that suburban life could inflict upon an unfortunate child outcast.

“Good grief!” the child said.

Unseen, the imp nodded.

It was very good grief, indeed.

I looked around at the apartment that had never felt like home, at the things I had never wanted in the place of things I’d never thought I could have… I looked at the all things I had never truly owned and that no longer owned me. I looked back on the years that had no so much passed as piled up on top of each other, an unruly, untidy mess of time that I had told myself I would definitely get around to cleaning up, you know… one of these days.

“Because I was never really here,” I said.

If it was hard for her to hear it, it was just as hard to say it.

No one knows that he’s a lion, or at least had been one, once upon a time. Wrapped up in a ratty old blanket and a fatigue jacket that’s as badly faded as he is, he’s nearly indistinguishable from any of the innumerable other lost souls sitting on street corners in the new concrete jungle. Propped up in the lion’s lap is a sign: Will Work For Food.

A woman comes up to him, fierce as any lioness. She looks down at him scornfully.

“Don’t you have any pride?” she asks.

“Not any more,” the lion says.

He taps the sign.

She walks away, disgusted.

I’d gone for the annual flower show, though it wasn’t the flowers that interested me so much as the arrangements they formed with the stone and colored glass and light around them. Really, the flowers were the smallest part of it… an accent, like a boutonnière on the lapel of the old church.

It was raining that day, though, and the light that streamed in through the stained glass was meager and cold and gray. I didn’t stay long. I’ve never been one to handle disappointment well.

When I stepped outside, she was standing there on the stone steps, her face tilted up to the sky. Her skin was dark and beaded with water. Her hair was thick and lively. She had the most beatific smile I’d seen in a long time, and considering where I’d just come from that was saying something.

There are almost certainly far more than two kinds of persons in the world, but if one of those kinds were “people who go to church flower shows by themselves to quietly admire the intersection of architecture and art”, that group would almost certainly be nearly mutually exclusive with “people who say hello to pretty strangers”.

I said hello to her. She tilted her face forward and opened her eyes, blinking like she was waking up from a sleep, and said hello back.

“Here for the flowers?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’m here for the rain.”

“Would you like to get coffee or something?”

“I hate coffee,” she told me. “But I’d love something.”

So we went to a little open air cafe, where we had crème brulée and she drank old-fashioned root beer from an old-fashioned glass bottle while I, feeling too much an adult for such a thing, pretended to enjoy my coffee. There were no other patrons on the patio, as a fine mist was still falling. We talked. I said more to her than I say in a week’s worth of conversations to my coworkers, even the ones I consider my friends. It was amazing. Even more amazing, she seemed to enjoy it.

The sky was still low and gray when we finished, but it was only intermittently spitting. I asked her if she might like to visit a museum, or go see the botanical gardens, or even go to a movie. She declined each suggestion, a little sadly.

“Would you like to do anything?” I asked her, trying not to sound desperate.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I told you. I’m only here for the rain.”

One last drop landed on her forehead as she said that. She held out her hands, palm up, as if checking for more. She smiled.

“Thank you,” she said. “Goodbye.”

And then, just like that, she was gone.

I started taking walks in the rain more often after that. At first I was hoping to see her again. Eventually I realized that I wouldn’t. I didn’t stop, though. I’d come to love the rain for itself. I also started taking more chances, saying hello to strangers.

I still can’t quite bring myself to go to a cafe on a Sunday morning, order root beer and then drink it straight from the bottle.

I’m working on that.