__\::_(((rain)))_((at))_((((christmas))))_::/__

It would always rain at Christmas, even when it wouldn’t. He had for years been steeling himself for this year, had gathered the necessary equipments, the agents of catastrophe, had prepared the necessary arrangements. Though he cared greatly for his wife the marriage itself was spent; there was nothing left to talk about, there was nowhere left to go. Though the kids were not grown to adulthood they were nonetheless older than the babes in arms over whom he had wept in hospital corridors and darkened living rooms swamped by the great guilt of creation. Beyond the immediate they would find that they would soon flourish in his long absence, happier and better for it. They were two of his very few achievements and did not require him to be so. The year had seen no single point of trauma that had escalated his thoughts to such extremity, only the continuing and gradual swelling of the slighter discomfits which coalesced into something cumulative and suffocating and vast directly beneath the very surface of life visible. Be it work, or money, or people or persons, the dying earth. Be it something inside, the prodigious depression that he had for half a lifetime harboured, had for years medicated, had at no time managed. It was a quaggy sadness, low level and flat but constant, the world a thing that happened beyond him upon which he exerted no force, and he no part of it. The raindrops pummelling the metal scaffold outside were as artillery, almost melodic. He wrote to his wife a note that in an envelope he sealed with a tongue very dry. I remember, it said, the times we were young, and I will and I will until I remember nothing further. I remember our daughters’ faces studied like artworks as they came forth from you and into this. Beyond which he had little to say. He was very calm, had anticipated torrents but felt nothing like it, very calm. It was a short walk to the shore, the small gravel beach at the edge of the tarn. A coke can faded orange at the lip of the water. A flayed tennis ball. Would the water accept him. He would be small against it. He felt a rush of cold as the water reached his neck. The trees bade faretheewell in whispers, they bade merry Christmas.