Character Sketch of an Evening

It was a dark and stormy night. That's how it's suposed to begin, right? Well, being night, it can't really help but be dark. And it is stormy. But it's not as dark as it could be...street lights casting their sickly orange glare on the puddles left by the storm that spent itself long ago, and whose second wind is petering out.
The drizzle is enough to obscure the reflections in the puddles, but not enough to soak to the skin in five minutes. I'd know that.
Nights like this call to me. Sometimes, when I can't cry, the sky does it for me. That's how I ended up barefoot several blocks from my house under a tree that was weeping its last storm-borrowed tears onto an already saturated ground.
There's this thing with me: Sometimes, I have to get away. Usually outside. Up high, if I can--in a tree or on a roof. There was this place when I was a kid, that I used to go, a drainage ditch for the nighborhood, if you could call it a neighborhood. The nearest neighbor was far enough away that you could see their house only in the dead of winter when the trees stood bare.
This ditch had a conduit raised a bit, that water would flow from after a rain. Under the pipe was a pool, with some timber and bricks, almost as though someone long ago had tried to turn it into a fish pond.
But the pond, if there ever was one, was gone, and the bricks were jumbled and covered with moss, and crawfish made their home in the icy cold waters there, before it flowed down a stream-like ditch through the bamboo grove and into the lake.
This pool is where I used to go to be alone. It was far enough from the house to be hidden, yet close enough to hear the dinner bell. And we had a real dinner bell too--the iron triangle with the clanger--but I digress. I used to pretend that the culvert spewed forth the waters of the fountain of youth. And I used to write poetry there. Bad, teen-angsty poetry, but poetry none the less.
That pool is mostly dry now. I haven't been there in years. And I've not really found a place to go to be alone since then. Tonight I tried the riverbank.
Several years ago I had a friend with whom I always went to the riverbank, but never at night. She ended up slitting her wrists after an attempt to hang herself didn't work.
The oak weeps for her too.
Sometimes, you just have to talk to nature. It's been around a lot longer than you, and seen a hell of a lot more. Sure, the trees and bugs and squirrels aren't really listening. They really don't hear your problems and they won't give you advice. But sometimes, that silence--you know, the one that's really full of sound, just not human sound?--sometimes that silence is a comfort. You don't even have to say your problems out loud. In fact, you can't. Because you'd break that silence. So you sit, or stand. And listen to the rain on the leaves, on the water, on the ground. Feel it run down your hair and back. And you absorb the silence. And you listen to the tears of the sky. The ones that aren't salty, and won't make its face red and puffy like yours make your own. And you let them run down your cheeks.
And something inside you clicks.
And things are a little better for a while.