In the Rain

 
These are the things that happened today in Wellington, in the rain: The wind from the harbour moved the curtains and touched the hairs of my arm with insistent promise, and the rain came into the street at a fighter-pilot angle. I stood on the overbridge that goes over the motorway from the Terrace and turned my face into the wind so that the rain lashed at my face like a solid thing. I walked down Courtenay Place with a friend late at night after the rain had stopped and we saw a girl’s silhouette curled up on her windowsill smoking and we shouted out to her that she was like something in a French movie and she said she couldn’t hear us and we walked on and by the time we came back she must have gone inside because she was gone.