The City Keeps Its Ghosts in Water

After rain, the city gives back every face it has swallowed. Puddles gather under streetlights, dark and trembling, each one holding a version of the sky too broken to be believed. The sidewalks shine with borrowed stars. Cars pass and split the light open. For a moment, everything looks as if it survived some private flood. I used to think ghosts needed houses. Staircases. Attics. Rooms where the air still knew the shape of a voice. But the city has no patience for old rules. It keeps its dead in reflections. In bus windows after midnight. In the silver backs of spoons left beside cooling soup. In rainwater caught in the cracked lip of a curb. There are people I do not look for and find anyway. A shoulder turning ahead of me on the sidewalk. A laugh opening too quickly from a stranger’s mouth. A coat the same colour as a year I have tried not to enter again. Memory is not always a door. Sometimes it is weather. It arrives without asking, darkens the glass, makes every surface briefly honest. The streetcar wires hum above me like nerves refusing sleep. Condos lift their bright rooms into the clouds, each window a small square of someone else’s life. Inside, people are making dinner. Taking off shoes. Forgetting the day in ordinary ways. I envy them with a gentleness that almost feels like prayer. Not because they are happy. I do not know that. But because, from the street, their lives look unhaunted by distance. A lamp. A table. A body moving from room to room without checking what followed it home. The rain continues. Soft at first, then harder, as if the sky has remembered what it was holding back. Water gathers in the seams of the road. Runs down the glass towers. Darkens the cuffs of my jeans. Touches everything without keeping any of it. I wish I knew how to do that. To arrive. To feel. To leave without becoming a record of every place that hurt me. But I have always been more archive than river. More room than rain. I keep things. Receipts. Voices. The exact angle of a person’s absence. The last ordinary day before it became evidence. Still, the city teaches what it can. How water can make a ruin look holy. How light can return even broken. How a street can hold so many footsteps and remain only pavement. At the corner, the signal changes. Green man walking. White-lit, faceless, briefly immortal. I step forward with the others. All of us crossing through rain. All of us carrying our small dead beneath our coats. No one says anything. No one needs to. Above us, the wires sing. Below us, the puddles tremble. And for once, the city does not ask me to move on. It only opens its wet hands and lets me pass through.