He sits there and looks at the people.

They come and go. Outside it rains and the room is repeatedly torn apart by the glare of lightning, followed by rumbling thunder. He sits there looking at the people bringing in the scent of the rain. They shake out their tippets and umbrellas, hang them up and walk past him. Not a single glance passes him. He sits there looking at the people as they hang up their clothes. Sometimes a sleeve brushes him or a few raindrops sprinkle him because he sits so close to the people. He sits there looking at the people eating and drinking, without eating or drinking anything himself. The waitress must not have seen him. He sits there looking at the people chatting without saying a word himself. He is all alone. He sits there and waits. At least that’s how it seems. Maybe he is waiting for the storm to stop. Or maybe for someone to see him. But that does not happen. He just sits there and looks at the people and then he looks at me. He sits there and looks at me. I sit there and look at him, like his reflection.

I sit there looking at him without talking or eating or drinking. I am alone. It seems as if he is invisible. But he is not. I see him. I sit there and look at him as he gets up, comes to me and sits across from me. He looks me straight in the eye and I realize that he is invisible, that I am invisible. We sit there looking at each other, looking at people without eating, drinking or talking.

Then he says, “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain!”. He takes my hand and pulls me outside. We walk through the people. Sometimes we brush against them by accident, but no one pays any attention to us, as if we were invisible. We walk, leave the place and walk and walk and keep walking through the damp, the cool, the rain. The darkness envelops us and lightning flashes light our way. We walk faster and faster, turning in circles, we dance in the rain to the music of the thunderstorm and laugh and let the drops fall on our faces until we are all wet and I finally feel visible again. We dance and dance and dance, hair disheveled, dancing in the wind.

A soft melody creeps into my ears. “It sounds like the butterflies are singing to me. What did you do to me?”, I ask him. He laughs and replies, “He who hears butterflies laughing knows what clouds taste like.”

Position

Author

Basler Eule

The theme of the 2013 Basler Eule writing competition was “Visible, Invisible”. My then poetry slam self wrote a philosophical prose text on this topic and won first place. After that, the text was performed several times on the poetry slam stage.