Drama Queen

It’s friday evening, and I am dead tired. For 2 full days, Antii Karpinnen has been trying to fill up my head with information during his masterclass. He is good, he is great – I absolutely love his work- but I feel overwhelmed and flooded with information. It’s time to go.

My colleagues-fellow-students seem to want to hang around a bit longer, but I just slip outside. I turn on my phone, and immediately I get 3 alerts from my buienalarm (app that predicts rain and sorry folks living outside EU, its probably not available in your app store), “heavy rain expected within 10 minutes”, this app is always right. I open Waze who tells me I will be on the road for 1h and a half. I am not even going home, but stopping halfway. I am at the complete other side of Belgium, Pelt. But it’s Friday, it’s rush hour, and it is raining (somewhere); there is no worse combination.

Damn.

This is one of those days that I wish I had a time machine. To push a button and be home. How magnificent would that be now!

But well, even AI can’t create that yet, I think, so I start driving.

And that is when I see it. The sky, oh that sky!!!

The sun is shining, but far off in the distance the sky is pitch black dark, right in front of me. It’s so impressive that I wish my cell phone camera wasn’t broken, yes, I admit that I sometimes take a quick photo while driving. All of a sudden I am wide awake again, I am energetic, I change the tunes on my radio, I sing along, make some dance moves (while remaining seated, of course) : I am totally thrilled.

Oh pure joy!!

I start speeding, I realise that once it starts pouring, traffic will get stuck. I approach the clouds, it gets dark. No rain. I drive back in an area of sun and again I head towards dramatic looking clouds. On one side it’s raining, and it looks as if the cloud is extending towards the ground in the shape of a funnel. A but further off the sun is beaming through the clouds.

No painter could paint this. He probably could he would not be found credible.

I can’t escape the rain for ever. It’s coming. Red break lights in the far distance warn me. I slow down. It starts raining. Then it’s pouring. It turns into a complete cloudburst. I slow down more, and more, until I am hardly moving anymore. Waze is going onto night view and the screen turns dark, I get one warning after the other, flood ahead, fog ahead. My car chimes and tells me that the security system is no longer working, that I should ‘clean my camera’.

No kidding. I can hardly see the lines on the highway that are covered with lots of water. I imagine I would be down upto my ankles in the water if I got out now. I don’t, of course. Without fog lights everyone seems invisible. Some madman in a van speeds past me. He needs to deliver his last package before the weekend starts. He disappears into the rain in no tome.

And then it’s over. The sky clears out, the light comes back, and in the distance, another black cloud is on the way. I could never get enough of this dramatic beauty in the sky. But this time I get enough time to enjoy the spectacle ; the roads are way too wet to speed, and approaching Brussels, traffic is totally congested. But Waze was right, in exactly 1h and a half I arrive at my destination. Revitalised. Ready for the weekend. And then the clouds go away altogether.

Perfect.

Have a great weekend!