The fine rain of New York fell like a curtain of gray gauze, blurring the city lights and creating puddles that reflected the neon signs.
Alyx left the gym. The pain in her muscles was a familiar, almost comforting presence due to its constancy in this exercise. The humid air mixed with the steam rising from her heated body. She lit a cigarette under the building's awning; the first drag felt like it scratched her throat. With it, the nicotine's effect was instantaneous—a brief reminder that helped calm her nerves still vibrant from the effort.
She walked without a fixed direction, her boots splashing in puddles, the hood of her sweatshirt up, even though her clothes were getting soaked by the rain, at least her head was superficially covered from the cold. As she walked, she thought about not wanting to return to the silence of her apartment, at least not yet. Because now, within those four walls, she felt the echo of the circus that, for her, was that intervention. Well-intentioned as it was, it haunted her, especially Barney's words. It was like a constant ringing of bells in her head that she wanted to silence but persisted: "Impossible profits... insider information from the future..." It made her shudder more than the cold of this night.
She turned a corner and came across a small scene that stopped her in her tracks. There, by the entrance of a closed café, under an absurdly bright canary-yellow umbrella in the gloom, was a young woman. She had a bulky backpack on her back and, in her left hand, a small instrument stored in its own case. She was trying to hold it against her body, protecting it from the rain, while also carrying the clearly heavy backpack on her back, and covering everything, including herself, with the umbrella clumsily held between her shoulder and cheek.
"You need a third hand," Alyx said before thinking more, approaching her as she tossed the rain-extinguished cigarette butt into a nearby small trash container.
The young woman turned her head slightly, still holding her things, clearly surprised by the offer. She had an open expression, with big, curious eyes and a smile that seemed about to appear even in the midst of discomfort. "I almost have it! It's just like a human puzzle trying to fit all my things together, and I think the solution involves giving up my dignity and waiting with all my stuff for this rain to end under some store's awning."
Moved by an impulse she didn't understand, Alyx simply approached. "Here," she said, taking the umbrella from the young woman's hand. "I'll hold it. You cover your good friend."
"You're an angel sent by the god of music (and of not soaking precious instruments)," said the young woman with genuine relief, gently and lovingly wrapping her small ukulele with her jacket as if it were a child. "Seriously, thank you. I was going to play at a bar a couple of streets away, but it seems the universe had other plans, like soaking me to the bone."
"Seems to be the universe's favorite plan lately," murmured Alyx, holding the umbrella to cover them both. The vibrant yellow of the umbrella surprisingly didn't seem garish to her; instead, she felt it created a small, intimate world under the rain.
"You too?" asked the young woman, studying her with a gaze that wasn't intrusive but interested. "Divine plan of emotional drowning or more of the physical type?"
Alyx let out a short, dry chuckle. "A bit of both, but more focused on a slow drowning with coffee and bad decisions."
"Ah, you're in the fuel and poison phase. Yep, I know it well," the young woman nodded to her words with clear understanding and leaned against the wall, stroking the ukulele's body. "I went through the cookies and tears phase after... well... after someone very important to me left, well, forever."
Something in the way she said it—without drama, just with the dull weight of a clearly painful fact—resonated with Alyx. This conversation wasn't an invitation to confess, just a simple declaration of companionship in a clear moment of sharing those great pains of life.
"And what do you do now?" Alyx asked, genuinely curious.
"Well, I paint a picture, though I'm not sure what about yet," said the young woman, and her smile became ironic. "It sounds terribly boring, I know. But after they left, it's my way of finding... something. I don't know what yet. And if that picture helps me... I live with a friend, and well, some occasional gigs help me maintain a focus, a structure for living my life after, you know? Having something more."
Alyx looked at her, amazed. In her view, it was as if she were channeling the chaos left by that person who left forever into a structured form that keeps her living, albeit slowly better and without harming herself. Alyx recognized that she was doing the same; that was the perfect definition of her last months with trading, Muay Thai, even compulsive cleaning... they were rigid structures to contain an internal hurricane.
"I paint too," Alyx said, not knowing why she was sharing that. "Or I try. I do trading. And... I hit myself at a gym. I guess that's my focus or structure for my chaos."
The young woman nodded as if it made all the sense in the world. "Yes, it's similar. I like how that sounds: structure in chaos. And does that structure work?"
"No," Alyx responded with liberating honesty. "It only helps me keep the chaos controlled, but it's still there."
"Maybe the point isn't for it to disappear," said the young woman softly, watching the rain. "Maybe the point is to learn to dance in the rain with it. Or, at least in my case, to play a sad but beautiful solo. Do you have something that ties you to the chaos? You know, a specific object."
Alyx thought of the silver earring, the sketchbook, all of it plus the memories of a future she shouldn't know.
"An earring," Alyx whispered. "Silver. It's not mine, but I kept it. Then the person it belonged to returned it to me through their partner, and now I have both. And it really feels... as if it's telling me, 'This is yours now.' But now I don't know what to do with it. The other one I had, I kept it very carefully, along with a sketchbook that was hers and that I finished. But the thing is, having this other earring is like... it's both an endpoint and a starting point, but I don't know in which direction to go."
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