The one who runs

It feels like a decade since it last rained. I can't even remember the last time it actually rained. These past weeks, the weather has been very suggestive, sending out signs and hints, luring everyone to believe it will rain - dark clouds, rumblings of thunder - but it never happens. The unpredictable and unseen wind almost always sneaks up on those gray clouds and blows whatever chance of rain there is right out of the sky.

The only form of precipitation I'm encountering is my own tears. Tears over a book, no less. I've been reading The Kite Runner again. I bought the novel a week before I left Ann Arbor in 2005, something I shouldn't have done as I'd already packed and shipped off most of my books and really didn't need another one to carry home. But I'm glad I did. Reading and crying over the absorbing and affecting novel was a convenient cover-up for my own sadness over leaving a town I'd grown to love and where I'd grown intellectually and spiritually. I wandered and dreamed a lot when I lived in Ann Arbor as an undergraduate and a graduate student, and my time there also led me to places far beyond the town itself.

It was watching part of the film adaptation of The Kite Runner on a recent flight home that made me want to read the novel again. Once more, over two days and nights, I smiled at the depth of friendship between young Hassan and Amir, the love Hassan bore Amir, and how profoundly Hassan knew Amir that it amazed Amir himself. My heart clenched as Amir later avoided Hassan, rejected and eventually drove him away. I thought long about the characters who kept running from their mistakes, running from the people they hurt, running from themselves. All except Hassan, who ran only for love of his friend, ran to retrieve kites for Amir and always returned to him. I think every person wishes they had someone who would offer to run the kite for them, who would say, "For you, a thousand times over."

On the last page of the novel, when I came across that line again, I cried, not for the first time in the night. I shouldn't have, because over the years, I've been steeling myself, telling myself to be less sensitive, less affected by things around me. So I'm confounded that even now, all it takes is a story to undo me. But after everything, I'm glad I'm able to cry; some part of the person I am is still the girl I used to be.

"Rain," by Priscilla Ahn.

"Kite Song," by Rosie Thomas.

Posted by Monoceros at May 7, 2008 1:27 AM