Moments came and went. They fell out of the ordinary time, falling like rain from a passing cloud. Sometimes it was unwelcome rain, like a cold winter day when the hard wind blew the icy rain into her face. Clara could only put her head down and plough on into it, hoping it would soon pass and she would be back in the warm again.
Other times, those moments fell like the rain after a long dry, hot spell and there was nothing sweeter than standing out in that moment and letting it all wash over her.
Clara was there, in such a dry place, a long hot dry spell in her life. She felt each day as an endless trudge through a desert of possibility. Everywhere she looked, the same featureless expanse of emptiness surrounded her. Every step Clara took, left her no closer to anything she could recognise as some way out of her current predicament.
Her job was dull and poorly paid. Her friends were all growing away from her, falling into new lives that left Clara behind. All doing things she could not do, going to places she could not afford, meeting people she did not want to like. She hadn't had much luck with men and couldn’t see that changing.
She needed some rain to pour down on her desert life and bring it into bloom, fill up her dry cracked river beds with fresh flowing water again. But all she could see was the same nothingness ahead as she’d already trudged through.
Then, one morning, a morning much like any other, she was stumbling to work down a dull quiet street when her foot struck something hard. She looked down and saw a book, kicked open, with its pages fluttering in the slight breeze. Bending down she looked at the book.
Looking closer, she saw her own name on a few of the pages fluttering past. She looked around, seeing no-one and picked up the book.
As she glanced at the pages, flicking through them, she noticed slowly at first drops of rain falling on the pages.
She looked up to see a solitary cloud in the blue sky, the first rain for weeks.
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