THE NARRATIVE ARC

Finding Our Way Home — Whether We Want to or Not

Here, the rain will always smell like exile

Ryan Frawley
The Narrative Arc
Published in
6 min readOct 7, 2024

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Interior of a bus in the United Kingdom on a rainy day
A rainy bus ride in England. Photo by author.

The windows are opaque

A wet gray film collects on the inside of the glass, a mingled miasma of breath and rainwater rising off hair and clothes. Finding the cold glass, the vapor turns back into water, shutting off the outside world until it gets thick enough to turn into fat sluggish drops that roll listlessly away.

On a bus, in England, in the rain. On the top deck, feeling the exaggerated lurch every time the vehicle turns a corner. Thirty years ago, I had no idea what a Proustian moment was, but time teaches us many things. Not just French literature, but the emotions the literature carries, a blade wrapped in velvet, the tempest-tossed North Sea in every beaded bus window drop.

This, it feels like, is where I spent my childhood. On the buses that ran from my suburb into the heart of town, and back again. Buses like this one, groaning whales in the quicksilver stream of city traffic, were how the young and the poor got around. And I was both.

When? Twenty five years ago. A generation. A lifetime. For me, several lifetimes, packed like the folds of your gyrified cerebral cortex into the bone vault of your skull.

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Ryan Frawley
The Narrative Arc

Novelist. Essayist. Former entomologist. Now a full-time writer exploring travel, art, philosophy, psychology, and science. www.ryanfrawley.com