It's nights like these that remind me most of Seattle.

The night is heavy with recent rain, the ground damp. There's a cool breeze that swirls around me, twisting in my hair and playing with the smoke trailing up from the cigarette in my left hand. The clouds are beginning to part, leaving a dark sky above. It's dotted with the tiniest shimmer of stars like the dusting of gold on the breast of a woman as she makes her way through the night.

I think back on Seattle with both a glimmer of regret and a deep-seated longing. There were so many things I thought I needed to return for, so many people I thought had tied pieces of my heart to their remember-me finger. I imagine it like the balloons people tie around the wrists of small children, pieces of me floating around Seattle like helium-filled latex.

I think back, sitting on the bench on the side of my house, to the times I spent leaning back in a chair in the tiny outdoor seating Le Pichet had, smoking a cigarette and drinking rich, sweet coffee as black as midnight with no desire to go home. Strangers would stop to ask for a cigarette, and in return, I'd ask for a secret: something they couldn't tell anyone else for fear of whatever it is people fear most when they realize they can't share themselves entirely.

Thunder would ripple through the Sound, and they'd tell me everything. Secrets of love and lust, betrayal and burning lies, failures and ill-gained successes. Everything came out once they got started, realizing they had found someone who listened. Like black sand, it poured from their mouths and filled the crevices in the sidewalks, creeping up the sides of our shoes. Sometimes the wind would catch a particularly high mound, trailing their deeds out into the middle of 1st and down the hill to the market below.

And I listened. Taking in their stories like one would drink down cold water on a day so hot even the Devil himself would beg G-d for a breeze. And I listened. One cigarette would turn into two. Two cigarettes turned into three. A single pot of coffee replenished and refilled tiny cups, while the glowing ends of cigarettes would spark and crackle, sending showers of sparks around our knees and elbows. They drifted down to that black sand and ignited it like gunpowder.

Then they were gone, drunk on the confessional that they had found outside a small french restaurant that gracefully accepted them without judgment or retribution. And the blackness in their souls now drifting through the streets of Seattle.