In the emptiness of my apartment

It took a silence to notice. A lull in my chosen method of distraction to hear it. When I heard it, it was like nothing had happened till that moment. Like my day hadn’t started although the sun had been down for hours. I rushed outside, but not wanting to forget my keys, I hesitated, and lost some of the fiercest of the winds and rain coming down. But that’s all right. It’s still enough.
The pain is still there, in its ebb and flow. But somehow I was alive again, somehow I could breathe again, with the world coming down around me. It’s like the filling of my existence. The thing that makes the pieces fit together. The mortar, the in-between. While others are squealing to run inside from the sudden downpour, I want nothing more than to run out into it, to soak it up.
But I don’t. Instead I step into the mud of my little garden on my concrete patio and listen, kneeling slowly to feel the mists coming ever so slightly sideways onto my skin. The two swallowtails building a nest on the hollow above my porchlight cling to the power wire, motionless. Only the gold of their underbellies gives them away.
I want to invite them in.
But I don’t.