The Weight of Unsent Rain

The Weight of Unsent Rain

The rain on the windowpane is not a sound but a texture, a wet, grey wool pressed against the glass of the study. It is November, or perhaps it is always November; the calendar on the wall has been turned to the same page for three years, a small, white rectangle that refuses to acknowledge the passage of time because time, in this room, is a luxury I cannot afford. I sit at the desk. The wood is dark, scarred by the rings of coffee cups that no longer come. My hands are cold. Not the cold of winter, but the cold of the machine that hums beneath the floorboards, a low, electric thrum that vibrates in the teeth.

I am an archivist. This is what I tell people when they ask what I do. I preserve things. I save them from the erosion of forgetting. But I have discovered that preservation is a form of violence. To save something is to kill it, to fix it in a pose that it never held in life. I look at the screen. The cursor blinks. It is a vertical line, black and steady, waiting for me to give it meaning. I have a file open. It is named Elias_Final. Inside are photographs. Scans of photographs. The resolution is high enough to see the pores on his skin, the slight asymmetry of his left eyebrow, the way the light catches the dust in the air around his shoulders. But it is not him. It is a ghost made of pixels, a shadow that has learned to sit still.

There is a heteronym in my head. Let us call him Bernardo. Bernardo does not grieve. Bernardo observes the grief with the detached interest of a biologist studying a rare beetle. Bernardo notes that the fan in the computer case is spinning at 1200 revolutions per minute. He notes that the air in the room is stale, recycled, devoid of the scent of pine or earth or the sharp, metallic tang of the sea we visited in 2019. Bernardo writes this down. He does not feel the ache in his chest. He only records the location of the ache. It is in the sternum, just below the collarbone. A hollow space. A pocket where the weight used to be.

I try to upload a video. It is a clip of Elias laughing. He is holding a glass of wine, his head thrown back, the sound bubbling up from his throat like water from a spring. The file is small. Four megabytes. It should take seconds to upload. But the progress bar moves with the glacial slowness of a glacier calving. I watch the percentage climb. One percent. Two percent. The silence in the room is absolute. The only sound is the fan. The only movement is the bar. I feel a sudden, violent urge to throw the mouse through the screen. To shatter the glass and let the pixels spill out like blood. But I do not move. I sit. I wait. I am a clerk in the office of eternity, stamping forms that will never be filed.

Bernardo points out that the video is imperfect. The audio is compressed. The laughter is tinny, stripped of its resonance. It lacks the warmth of the room it was recorded in. It lacks the smell of the wine, the chill of the air, the presence of the other people who were there, whose faces are blurred in the background. The video is a lie. It is a representation that has forgotten it is a representation. It pretends to be the thing itself, and in doing so, it insults the thing itself.

I think of the stone in my pocket. It is a river stone, smooth and heavy, picked up from the bank of the Tagus years ago. I carry it with me everywhere. It is real. It has mass. It has weight. If I hold it in my hand, I can feel the pressure of it against my palm, the coolness of the rock, the slight roughness of its surface. It anchors me to the earth. It reminds me that I am a body, that I occupy space, that I am subject to gravity. The digital file has no weight. It floats in the cloud, a cloud that is not made of water but of electricity and regret. It has no resistance. It cannot hurt me. It cannot help me. It is nothing.