Rain

Around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, soon after I brought all my dried laundry inside, the sky started to darken and the grumbles of thunder were heard. I thought myself lucky - after all, it would've been a shame for my freshly laundered sheets and blankets to be soiled all over again. I grabbed Irving's novel and spread out in the living room. Lightening started to spark.

After a while, I paused my reading. It was quickly getting darker, and I found it hard to read. But instead of getting up to turn on the light, I reached for one of the dining chairs, slid open the screen door, and sat on the veranda. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt above my head and just sat, watching the black clouds roll themselves across each other.

I hate to be so cliched, but there certainly is something cathartic about sudden, early afternoon thunderstorms. These past few weeks have been a bit of a roller coaster ride for me. Except, the part where the coaster climbed, building up anxiety, continued excessively and was only followed by a short drop that did no justice to the amount of anxiety accumulated. In short, I had started to store a kind of frustrated angst inside my gut, just at the bottom of my lowest ribs, that no amount of sighing or drinking tea could relieve. The sudden, yet determined, act of sitting on the balcony in thundering weather was, thus, like reaching out for that ever-so craved cigarette after months of abstinence: instinctive, yet purposeful.

My love and passion for percussion, I always believed, was due to its liberating ability to express quite precisely the angst, sorrow, tenderness, and umph that I could not express otherwise. Thunder, I found that afternoon, did very much the same thing for me. As I sat trying to curl my toes on to the edge of the plastic seat, I felt every crack and rumble pierce that spot at the bottom of my lowest ribs. I didn't feel that much better, but I felt like I did.

Soon, the first drops of water began to fall, but this was nothing more than a tease. It would be a good 20 minutes later that the seemingly random drops would turn into torrential downpour. When was the last time anyone just sat watching rain fall, instead of hurriedly taking cover from the unwarranted wetness? Well, it had been a while for me, anyway, and so once the rain started to fall, that was actually more interesting to watch than the eruptive sparks of lightening.

Rain doesn't just fall from a cloud, to the ground, especially if there is some wind. It ebbs and flows. That afternoon, the rain fell in front of me as if someone above the clouds were watering his plants with a giant hose, turning from left to right to make sure that all of his plants were getting the moisture they needed. So, for two or three seconds, the scene in front of me was that of downpour, and then it would soften into a misty spray. For a while - as stupid as this may sound- I sat on the balcony, mesmerized by this ebbing and flowing fall of rain, while sparks of lightening struck through the clouds above me. Occasionally, a sudden crack caught my attention, but always I was drawn back to the rain.

I soon realized that the skies were getting lighter and lighter. I wondered if the clouds would break and the sun would come through. But, alas, that would be too perfect for such an imperfect world, an imperfect life, the imperfect existence of my being. The little horizon I could locate through electric wires and poles, across rooftops and between apartment buildings, was turning light-yellowish, and while the rain had begun to subside the grumbling thunder could still be heard from afar, and I thought to myself, Shit, you too? You, too, won't let me indulge in cathartic bliss, won't ease the anxious pain, won't let me free? As I began to interrogate the winds above were carrying the clouds away, as if to say, "That's enough grumbling for you."

So, they were gone. And the rain began to monotonously fall, and its cold indifference was exactly the kind I wanted to escape.