Nayarit Neon Rain

It's been raining here. For about 4 days straight. I love the rain. I used to hate it, but now I love it. I love the gloominess and the excuse to be bundled up. And there's something about it that brings people together. Growing up in Colorado, I hated winter. I dreamed of the day I would move to California and never have to trudge another snowy step. So strange how things change and the most hated moments become some of the most precious, in retrospect.

It was Saturday night, two days ago. Today is Monday. I went to work in the pouring rain and was mesmerized by the haunted and somehow mystical nature of Hollywood boulevard. A good friend of mine once told me that LA is full of ghosts. On every street corner. (He was speaking figuratively, of course.) Memories. Experiences. Past friendships. Lives lived and then gone. Only the afterglow of the neon signs can verify their existence. It's funny though that the rain doesn't wash away any of those memories. Somehow it just makes them a little more present, at least for me, that is.

Anyway, there I stood in the doorway of the huge, empty sports bar. All 50 big screens, silently illuminating the dimly lit space. No big games were on this particular eve, so instead of the usual blaring fanfare soundtrack, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland Christmas Carols softly hummed in the background. I, the only server on, had one table. 2 drenched, gossiping girls who were disappointed at the sell out of the movie they wanted to see. I'm fairly sure they were servers too. I don't know how I knew that, but I did.

I watched the drops of rain spill down over the restaurant logo and looked across the street, taking comfort in the fact that the neon sign was witness to the memory I was recalling in my mind. A dinner I once had with an old friend on this very street corner. An old friend who changed my life forever. But that's a different story.

All of a sudden, I turned around and there stood Edgar. Edgar is from Nayarit, Mexico (Zacatecas to the northeast and Jalisco to the south and the great Pacific to the west). Sinewy and handsome, he is. He appears to be more of a Spanish descent than Mexican and if he were to play a character in a movie, it would be a mysterious, but kind vampire.

"Te gustas la lluvia." (Do you like the rain?) He asked me.
"Por su puesto." (Of course.) I responded.

He, unlike me, then told me he only likes the rain if he has a girl to sit and talk with, on the couch, while watching movies.
I laughed.
"Te gustas peliculas?" Was his next question.
And what seemed like a flirtatious comment, turned into a conversation I never would have expected.

"Yes," I told him. "I like movies."
"What Kind?" He asked.
"Movies about love."
He laughed.
"It's because I'm always thinking about love." I told him. "I want to understand it."
"What about you?" I asked him.
"Me gusta pelicuas del terror..." He said with a look in his eye.

I always think the things people like are somehow a reflection of their souls, or at least the questions they are asking within their souls. The images or feelings that constantly resurface and are in search of some sort of meaning and need an outlet. So why then, did Edgar love horror movies? I had to know.

"Have you seen a lot of scary things?" I asked him.
"No... not really..." He responded.
"But..." His face changed. "There was one thing that happened..."
He didn't want to tell me. He was afraid I wouldn't believe him. The glow of the neon lights reflected off of his eyes and I could tell what he was about to reveal to me was a moment that changed his life forever.

It was winter in Mexico and Edgar and his cousins ran around like wild, playing, anticipating the rain. The clouds were heavy and the air was wet and a little cold. He said he was about 10 or 11. It was his girl cousin he was standing next to when the thunder started. The one who he had coffee with two months ago when she came to LA for a visit and they verified with each other that this experience was most definitely not a dream. Only for a moment did they touch on the subject though, both too perplexed and awestruck, still to this very day, to try and make any sense of it, beyond the acknowledgement it's actual occurrence.

Isn't that how all magical experiences go? Isn't there little to nothing you can ever say that will actually encompass what it was that happened? In fact, sometimes it fees like the more you try to explain it, the less magical and synchronistically real it becomes.

What happened you ask?

They saw something.

A something that Edgar can not describe. The closest word he could come up with was a 'Dracula' of some sort. He was hovering there in front of them, with a cape and a chain and his head was down. He was suffering. And that was it. He didn't hurt them. He didn't say anything. He just existed. And it was the shared experience that changed the two cousins forever. The thought: 'Maybe we're not alone?' changed instantaneously to the knowledge that 'We most definitely are not alone.'

"Maybe he was a lost soul." Edgar said. "Maybe he had been laid to rest in the wrong town and he was looking for his family." Who knows what the spirit was doing there that night. But that moment was the birth of his quest for understanding of a great beyond the physical, tangible world that many accept as the only reality.

An experience like that changes a person. It gives them a heightened awareness to a reality that many others ignore or even scoff at. But, I would be lying if I said that I don't wonder if I hear footsteps every once in a while in my apartment when no one is home. I would be lying if I said that every once in a while I don't wonder if I just saw something strange...

What if I have just trained myself to not believe in my instincts and experiences because the world I grew up in was not open or spiritual enough to allow for such occurrences. What if Edgar really saw what all of us are capable of seeing, but just deny ourselves?

I looked out at the neon light's dizzying reflection on the wet street and thought about my own spirit. There is a part of me that is out there walking on that street reliving a moment. A moment that has not been laid to rest. I wonder if anyone has encountered my ghost. Maybe our unanswered questions trail behind us in the form of spirits, appearing before others to awaken them into their own existence.

Or maybe it was just a rainy night, and Edgar felt bored and wanted to tell a ghost story to a gullible girl. Either way, it made me think. And his forever life changing experience, suddenly became mine.