To Breathe Deeply

On a Saturday night, thirteen years later, your housemate invites people you don't know over for a party, for drinks and drugs and music in your backyard. Long grey clouds block the starlight and little patters of rain polka-dot the blue couch you dragged outside. Eventually the couch will be ruined, but those worries are far away.

You sit outside, making slightly stilted smalltalk to the crowd of British expats, confident and boisterous and cool, in that easy way you could never understand. They tell you how much better it is to live in Sydney than in London. Someone breaks a longneck on the brick tiles and you struggle to find all the pieces of glass as the rain pools on the patio– there isn't a drain for the water, so you put on your gumboots to wade through it.

No one knows it, but secretly you have been passing the besamim around that night for everyone to smell, filtering the goings-on like ghost stories through the stained glass behind the synagogue altar. The volatile chemicals wade through the puddles that are filling up in the little canyons of your brains, sending stories from the old days, flooding back and weeping in.

The smells mingle with the party and take you back to the synagogue, following the cool kids around, hesitant and possessed with the awkward ghosts of hierarchy. You play tag in the corridors which lead to the sunday school rooms and your kippot keep falling off your heads as you run. You're out of breath quicker than everyone else and you find yourself alone again, in the tilting marble mazes between childhood and whatever-comes-after. You peek into the deserted classrooms, looking for your friends. Probably they have abandoned you, to kiss each other and practice the mysterious arts of knowing what to say in conversations.

Walking up a flight of old wooden stairs, you find yourself in your bedroom. Your housemate's friends have found your stash of besamim under your bed and are divvying it up into little lines on your desk with a credit card, snorting the spices through five-dollar-bills. The smell of cardamom and cloves billows out of your open window to the neighbors below and you laugh uneasily. Everyone puts their kippot back on and you go downstairs together, around the corner to the hall where the Saturday service is still going on. You stand in the back during the amidah, in ripped jeans and red beanies and Blundstone boots. You fantasize about kissing people and being as cool as everyone else while your housemate's friends slyly rub dust off their nostrils.
Back in Sydney, the rain is still picking up, into one of La Niña's signature ragers. The growing pool in your patio fills higher, spilling into the laundry room and kitchen. The broken gutters overflow and pour through your windows. Water seeps, slowly at first, through the stained glass on the synagogue ceiling between the concrete beams, dripping down onto the bibles and old wood.

Soon, the downpour is too much for the old glass to hold and it begins bucketing down. The congregation hastily ends the service with adon olam as the floor of the great hall fills up with water, inches deep and ruining everyone's Saturday shoes. You are forced to tread water as the torah floats away in the deluge, out of its holy closet. The Rabbi chases after it in vain but his tallit hampers his breaststroke form.

Eventually the flooding rises all the way up to your bedroom, where you keep your spices in the old decorated box under your bed. The water searches through your room as if it possesses long tentacled arms, looking through your closet and drawers for a first-born Egyptian. It finds your besamim, under the bed, and violently empties the box.

As the floodwaters drain downstairs from your room, they rush through the doorways of your house, washing off the markings you had left there, for the angel of death. The great pelting rain whorls and bellows and sings like an old bearded cantor, until you can't hear anything anymore and all prayers flow to the stormdrains.