"touch the sun & kiss the rain"

                        As a kid I'd take the bus for a round trip to and back from school of one hour and a half every day for six long years. I'd always knock and stick my head against the window of the bus, rubbing the mist of my bad teenage morning breath with my sleeve. It'd be six thirty in the morning and seven thirty at night at the same time with nothing in between. I was not here. I was asleep. One day, exhaustion and boredom invoked my awakening to self-discovery, piercing a hole deep inside of me. I'd peep through the drops of icy rain and there they are ; those words, the actual call for pulling out the prism like pin of my hollow chest which all of a sudden started ticking offbeat. It cracked a chip open with a thump, vibrating behind my heart. A small hole appeared and sucked up unknown whirling images and sounds and sensations that I have never felt before.

                        It was a graffiti written on a grain silo that read “touch the sun and kiss the rain”. It was not as elabotrate and colorful as the ones you see in the streets, on trains or anywhere else. A simple yet gigantic handwriting spreading wisdom over fifteen to twenty meters. Big black rounded letters carved onto my memory. I laid my eyes on poetry for the first time of my life. It struck me with its beauty and changed my perception of this brand new world forever. I started looking out for words I would relate to and rely on so that one day I can eventually speak my own language of the soul. I read through books and found Life in Arthur Rimbaud's youth and poetry. I swallowed up his words and made them pound against my vocal chords, twisting and rolling when I could not sleep at night.

                        Years later, I was about eighteen, I drove on the same road my school bus used to take and stopped the car in front of the silo. A bright ocean blue paint covered the hole building. The words were gone. I discovered nostalgia and moved on for a while. Then I felt the ugly pain of separation through a metaphorical death. I struggled so hard to cope with such a traumatic experience that I am too scared to remember the details. The only person who meant the most and the best in life for me disappeared. This is a dark period of my teenage years which I can only recollect fragment by fragment with dark matter links holding them together. It had indeed a Quantum Physics aspect in the way it affected me. All I can think of him until today is the context in which I forgot him and the odd reason why I still have a good imprint of him on my mind. Different spans of my young years converged into the void that characterizes us all at about this age. I grew mad at the reasons I have been given shamefully by my family. They rejected him because he was “offtrack” and refused the “STANDARD” boxes they always wanted him to fit in. I can only remember he loved me the way a Godfather trusts his son. He was a bad ass gangster from my Far West imaginary realm. I was his equal. He spoke to me with his actual rusky tone and bad language which pleased me the most. That's all I can tolerate to say. I learnt a whole new set of words to master and he taught me a lot more. He said the thing that matters in life is the emotion and honnesty you put in the words you use. He convinced me that the power of words had to be an immediate, reliable and honnest expression of the mind. He fought like a proud man to claim that he is the only one to choose his path in life until his sister, my mother, threw him out of the family for good. I never heard any one mentionning his name in a conversation since that day. It feels as if he never existed and never mattered. I grew mad at my family and isolated myself reading and writing to celebrate my uncle my way with the words that keep on striking me with beauty. TOUCH THE SUN & KISS THE RAIN. Don't worry uncle. I'll write and I'll be heard!