He went outside, determined not to let the rain make a hermit of him. The streets were all urgent motion, a mass of organisms pushing, coursing, at times appearing to become something collective, yet each carrying a life’s full of memories and dreams which, inexpressible, sulked unseen beneath opaque faces.
A soft rain fell. Rain was the normal state of things here, it appeared. If the sun peeked out, it was like a spotlight, burning fiery red, then quickly, gratefully?, disappearing behind the clouds once more. Earth was more a foreign world to him now than Mars.
He sat gazing out the café window, trying to maintain some of the sanity of the stranger. Outside, a woman pulled down her pants and pissed in the middle of the sidewalk before calmly reseating herself. No one seemed particularly to notice. Was this how it was here now? He finished his coffee in a strange mood, melancholy and amused. The wind picked up, umbrellas pushed to their limits. Trees switched around as if engaged in some sort of tropical dance with the gusting breeze. Yet, somehow he remained untouched by it all. A young girl struggled by in the rain, the ass of her powder blue sweat pants emblazoned with the word pink, written in green. (Had Surrealism won? Or was this just more evidence that Earth was too absurd to make sense of its own absurdity.)