Artificial Weather System
by Gauraa Shekhar
7 A.M.
I’ve found myself a new ritual to cling to: when sun harshens our living room, powerful and punitive, like the steady burn of overhead bulbs we’ve learned to keep switched off, I roll the blinds back down, and set the TV to a ten-hour loop of rain. Sometimes I get really into it, and light the pillar candles on the dining table. If I’m feeling especially extravagant, I’ll grind beans for espresso; let its smoky notes hang thick in the air. It’s a tidy trick, an artificial weather system, and most days, it seems to work; I close my eyes, focus on the sound of rain, and make-believe I am elsewhere.
Last Friday, a thunderstorm was on its way to Manhattan. I studied the radar loop—a blue-green pixelation glitching in HTML—and reported the news back to my husband. We charged our laptops in preparation; our power bricks, too, just in case we lost electricity the next day. My husband asked me to wake him up early if the weather did something particularly interesting.
The following morning, the light was strong, unrestrained, dripping patterns along our floors. Blemishes invisible in softer hues were suddenly accented: newspaper smudges on white walls; preserved anniversary roses now browning. Like a reverse-transformation scene from a Disney movie: the last petal fell, neon lightning cascaded from the sky, and the surface of our apartment extended into claws. Except there was no rain. Not a single cloud in sight. I pulled the blinds back down and set the TV to a ten-hour loop of Twin Peaks’ Double R Diner Ambience. I lit all the candles, ground beans for espresso.
The Double R Diner video shows three classic booths, a jukebox; a window with a view of the street; mismatched frames displaying stock nature reprints. The sky is a clear dark-blue; the rain falls crisp, un-uniform. There are two cups of coffee, steam rising from each, which stay warm till the end of the video. Pots of vibrant zebra plants line the walls; sugar shakers and tabletop napkin dispensers uphold laminated menus; a scoop of ice-cream melts atop a warm slice of cherry pie. If I were still in college, I’d bring my homework here, lay books and papers across the width of the table, order too many coffees; spill too many on texts.
There are quite a few of these atmospheric videos to choose from— “Rain Sounds for Sleeping”, or “Rain & Thunderstorm Sounds Crackling Fireplace”, but I’ve developed a soft spot for this strange Twin Peaks ASMR video. Like a wounded ex-lover, I return to the same loop each morning, mesmerized.
I’ve dwelt in diners for so much of my life, I realize.
The Greenpoint diner I lived above for a year, where they refused to charge me for english muffins (after overhearing me on the phone with my employer’s accountant). The diner I lived across the year before—which my roommate and I visited every day for coffee, and yet never learned its name—we resigned to calling it what its sign shouted: BREAKFAST! EGGS! DINNER! I think about the midtown diner I once wound up at after getting caught in real rain with friends visiting from the Midwest. I didn’t like that one much; too cramped; expensive; unwelcoming. I think about the diner downtown I once stepped into with a friend I haven’t heard from in a year. There was no item on the menu that abided my dietary restrictions. We took off before anyone could approach us for our order, but my friend left a tip anyway. The diner was nice, though. Warm, like the one in the video.
I think about the Seinfeld-themed diner I lived across from last year, how my friends and I invariably ended up there—drunk, or sober, after nights out, or birthdays, or the fourth of July. We always argued over a plate of sweet potato fries.
Perhaps what I miss most is the homey respite of warm diners during unexpected showers. The coffee, the scrubbed-thin enamel mugs, the quiet company of distanced strangers. I lose myself in the video again—specks of dust aglow under pendant lights—and I wish I could be waiting out a storm at a diner, if only to look forward to going home again.
