In Search of Lost Time

The rain falls sharp only where I look.

Everywhere else it softens into suggestion—
a gray hum at the edge of the window,
a smear where the streetlamp should be.

But here, where my eye lands,
each drop is singular, vertical, precise,
shattering against the pavement
with the full attention of happening.

I move my gaze and the sharpness follows,
a small circle of clarity
dragging itself across the blur.
This is how memory works, I think.
A face in focus, the room behind it gone
A sentence, perfect, ringing—
but who said it, and where,
and why I was standing by the window:
peripheral, dissolved, rain.

I used to believe
I was recording everything, that the blur
was just compression,
retrievable later with enough effort.

Now I know the fovea is a kind of lie
we tell ourselves—that we are witnesses,
that we were there, when really we
only ever saw this one raindrop, and this one,
this one stitched into the fiction of a storm.

The rest was always falling somewhere I wasn't looking,
which is to say it wasn't falling at all,
which is to say the past is mostly weather I inferred
from the sound it made
against a window I was only partly facing.

Look at me, trying to reconstruct the flood
from the few drops I caught with my eyes.