Purple Rain

I’m writing this on my laptop as we’re driving through Virginia. It’s fairly late – 10 pm now- and we still have 2 hours to go. There is an incredible thunder and lighting storm sweeping a blazing holocaust across the highway outside, simultaneously scaring me and hypnotizing me to sleep. The sky is pitch black, and the lightening is ripping slits of pale lavender into the air around us, so close to the car. Everything seems to be pale pink or purple lately. The lightning, the blooming cherry blossoms, the tulips, the pale violet lines across my eyelids – I feel like I’m living in a Prince song.
The air has that thick ozone smell, of burning air and hot water and warm pavement. It’s cloying like tar in the summer, but filtered through the car vents it smells beautiful and fresh and strange. The cracks of lightning periodically get closer and further, we’re driving in and out of the storm on these roads that seem to wind ridiculously in and out of valleys and towns and hills and fog that makes my chest contract it scares me so badly. It runs across the road and snakes around signs and envelopes the car with frightening agility and speed.
Part of me is surprised to see any color in the trees, the cars, the houses around the highway – it seems like everything should lose it’s color at night, and be just as ghostly and pale as the white lines on the highway. When the lightning flashes everything is bright and green and colourful...and still there.
There is something lovely about being in a car in the rain. Isolated and close and damp, it feels intimate and strange. We’ve been passing the time since it got dark reading Steinbeck aloud and playing the ABC game. Bryan, warm and solid beside me, makes me feel safe, and the rain, when it’s not so forceful, lulls me into a humid sleep.