After the flood

The moment that the sky looks like a worn out dustcoat.

     The instant that the raindrops start falling on the roof of the ship. The seconds that they hit the polished wood like beads of sweat of a toiling god.    

     How long has Komfort been waiting for this? The dripping sound resonate in his ears as music played during a farewell party.

      Don't you forget about me. We'll meet again. You'll never walk alone.

      Most of his life, he has spend building this ship. His pièce of résistance. He build it by his own bare hands. Only using what was available: wooden hope, stony persistence, metal wariness

    Was it a calling? Was it a dream? Was it a disillusion?

     The boat will safe his live, eventually. This is what Komfort believes. That is why he kept working on it all those years. On the drizzling mornings, the hot-tempered afternoons, the auspicious evenings, the contemplative nights.

     Together with the construction work of the ark, Komfort began to collect and to store his precious memories, his secrets loves, his hidden desires, his nocturnal daydreams, his overgrown angers, his veiled fears.

     Bit by bit, the ship became his world. His refuge.   

     His shelter to hide away from the reality called daily life.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, the rain is falling harder and harder.

    Komfort smiles, he is relieved. He feels that time has come to evacuate. He knows what will happen. This rains will not stop to fall. This water will cause a flood.

    A deluge. To wash it all away.

    This world of emptiness. This earth of sham and shadows. Of pretence and patina. And he will stand on the deck of his floating house. And he will see them drowning.

    His teachers, his managers, his authorities, his demons.

    And after forty days of torrential rains, after more than a month a intense mopping of the dirty planet, the sun will break through the concrete clouds. Komfort will take a dove, send it to the drowned world. And when the bird returns, it will come and whisper in his ear tales about a new universe.

    A world full of gentle promises. A space full of strong desires.

*  *  *

Just before he wants to shut the huge doors, he wavers. What makes him loiter?  

   The cry of the children? The memory of poetry? The longing for marmite?

   Komfort realizes. At the moment supreme, he has to surrender. He is a coward, he is a renegade. This will be his penalty: he will drown too.  

    He will be vanished from the limpid earth like a fly swept from a car window.

*  *  *

All of a sudden, it stops raining. Yes, there's a descent torrent that is just strong enough to take his boat to the sea.

    He hesitates. Should he be sad? Depressed? In shock?

    But the naughty beams of the newborn sun are already tapping him on the shoulders. They dance like happy cows in an early spring before his disappointed feet.

    There has been no flood, no deluge, no drowning, no cleaning.

    Nevertheless, he feels baptized. Or resurrected. Or awakened from a bad dream. Or maybe it wasn't a bad dream. It was just life. And now he has to rise, to move on.