Quotidian

At first he thought it was raining in his dreams – as if he were somewhere up in the mountains and a mass of clouds covered him up with a sheet of drizzle. He seemed to be walking, surprisingly weightless, through a haze. He even felt the chill in the air and a whiff of wet barks and leaves. “Isn’t there a place dry and warm?” a voice seemed to sound in his head.

He rolled in his bed and a dim gray morning light, filtered through an overcast sky, fell on his face. Through the open door of the balcony his eyes first fell on the series of fat raindrops that clung to the iron railing. “So, it’s indeed raining,” he thought, realizing the source of chill in his dream. He instinctively checked the time – he had half an hour to get ready – and then looked out of the open door again. With a blurred vision – for not only because he was still half awake, but also because he wasn’t wearing his specs – he saw the raindrops trembling and falling off the iron railing, and then being replaced by another set of equally fat raindrops. “Is this how everything gets replaced, like raindrops?” he thought, “even memories?” For a few minutes, he got lost in a reverie. “Damn!” he suddenly muttered, “these rainy mornings sure give me some melancholic thoughts.” He stared at the white walls, a favorite method to calm his head, and looked intently at the hanging cobwebs.

Anyway, after a while of staring at cobwebs and shuffling in the bed, he woke up fully to realize that he had overstayed in bed. He hurriedly got ready, picked up the things he needed to carry, wore his shoes, checked for any electric switches that might be left on, and then finally locked the front door. He climbed down the stairs trying to remember if he had missed or forgotten anything.

Outside, the rain had diminished to the faintest of drizzles. The air was damp and heavy, and the trees were still dripping wet. Just when he came near his parked vehicle, a cat, all white with a few black stripes, ran across. The whole thing – the rains, the running cat, and the damp air – reminded him of something, but he could not seem to remember what exactly it was. “Just like déjà vu,” he thought. Only yesterday he overheard someone speak of déjà vu, and here he was experiencing it today. “How words catch up with us!” he thought again, with a slight nod of his head, the way he did every time he carried a conversation with himself. But he needed to hurry now, he realized. He hopped on the vehicle, started the engine, and swiftly went out of the building compound, onto the main road, and became a part of the rushing, office-going, quotidian crowd.