For You

02. storms and fragmented sentences

➳ J A M I E

       The first time Jamie Parker fell in love with the rain, she was six years old with a noticeable gap between her two front teeth. As years passed, a myriad of things changed for the better and for the worse. Jamie's classmates stopped teasing her at recess, and the rumble of thunder no longer made her sprint for her parents' room down the hall halfway through the night.

        A couple months short of being twenty-one years old, Jamie still loved the melody of raindrops drumming against the rooftop. There was something addictive about listening to thunder gradually crescendo and watching lightning bolts crackle from behind a bedroom window. At twenty, Jamie loved the rain because storm clouds and monsoons flooded her mind with memories of lost time, paving a temporary path to the past.

        Jamie looked forward to the clarity that came right after a thunderstorm passed, a clarity that could only be seen seconds after the rain washed everything away. When she stepped off the bus, filtered sunlight started poking through the gray cumulonimbus clouds. For a moment, all time stood still. There was complete silence around her as everything from the other passengers to the street lights faded. Sometimes silence was a thousand times more powerful than sound.

        As Jamie crossed the street, she left ripples in the puddles the storm had left behind, her wet footprints tattooing the pavement. She lived a couple miles away from campus in a rough neighborhood characterized by burnt out neon signs and vacant parking spaces. Half of the businesses on the block had closed down within the past couple of months. Shop windows and doors were left bolted shut, giving graffiti artists a new canvas for their artwork.

Before the semester started, Jamie had moved into an apartment with her best friend, Larkin O'Hara. Their new home for the next nine months was located above a laundromat and pawn shop owned by an immigrant Korean family. In exchange for a place to stay, Jamie and Larkin tutored the Changs' twin daughters in English every other school night.

        "How was business today?" Jamie asked the woman sweeping the floor behind the counter as she walked through the front door. "Did you make any new sales?"

        "Very slow," Mrs. Chang admitted with an honest smile. She rested the broom against one of the display cases and combed her fingers through her salt and pepper hair. Her dark eyes were unmistakably hollow, exhaustion draining the color in her pale cheeks. "Did you have good day at classes?"

        "You could say that," Jamie replied after a brief moment of hesitation, adjusting her bag strap over her shoulders. "The highlight of my day was helping this boy on the bus ride home with a crossword puzzle."

       "Like in back of newspaper?"

       "Have you ever tried one before?"

        "Gosh no. I don't know enough words yet to finish puzzle." Mrs. Chang laughed heartily as she stepped out from behind the counter, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath her flatbed sandals. "Did you knew this boy already?"

        Running her fingers along the edge of the dusty counter, Jamie shook her head. She thought about the boy with tousled chestnut hair and matching brown eyes and wondered if everyone in the world was destined to become a fading memory buried in a sea of history. His words looped in her head as she said, "I really wished I had asked for his name, though."

        "I'm sure you'll see him again, Jamie."

        A faint smile always tugged at the corner of Jamie's lips whenever she heard Mrs. Chang speak. One of things Jamie admired most about Mrs. Chang was her unwavering courage. She had managed to turn broken English into a bulletproof vest, the language barriers she faced every day in her small shop the war.