Rain speaks to me. Rainfall creates a mood, a train of thought, a release from the cool Northern California monotony. Cars swish by and I don’t want to leave my home. I don’t want to open the curtains. I don’t want to text anyone back. Rain tells me that it’s ok to be antisocial.
I live in my head. I breathe in nostalgia. I spend the majority of these winter days trying to make sense of this confusion. Trying to create solutions for a problem that I have yet to identify. Trying to avoid cliché’s while trying to arrive at inner peace. My bible has fallen to the floor. I haven’t picked it up in weeks. My future is frightening so I disappear into old things. The truth has become so distorted by the lapsing of time that often times I forget how destructive these things were to me. I lose the same race every night. I lose it in my soul.
In between raindrops I smile. While it is pouring, and only while it is pouring, I allow myself to cry. I cry for all of my mistakes. I cry for the dead. I cry for my inability to make things right. I cry to remind myself that beneath all of the masculine ideas that I have learned, I am still a human being.
The rain gives me an excuse to have pity on myself and to analyze the miserable side of being alone. And that being that so many people that I once loved, and even more importantly, that once loved me have moved on to happiness. They’ve moved on to engagements and husbands and children while I continue to move back to nostalgia. The days when I kissed them and left them where they stood. The days when I gave them just enough. The days when I thought they would always be there for me to come back to. The days when I thought that I had it like that. I don’t. I never did. Now all of these thoughts are inappropriate and all of these memories are painful. Just like the childhood memories of playing football at recess, goofing off in class, and getting the phone numbers of cute girls with friends that are no longer living. More dead memories.
I contemplate all of the false steps I have taken to get me to this point. I am astonished at how blind I had to be to have gotten so lost.
-YB
The rain has more rhythm in its descent from heaven than I will ever have in my body. The sound of it keeps me asleep when it’s steady and wakes me up as its pace quickens. Rain always represented excitement to me. Imagine growing up in a place where rain is the most extreme weather possible. As a child I discovered that rain cleanses the flesh and the soil. Rain symbolizes the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Kisses in the rain are more special, dinner in the rain is more meaningful, a movie in the rain is more intimate. I love to go to my favorite creamery and eat ice cream in the rain, for hot chocolate on such a day would be too cliché. Ice cream taste sweet but the rain is sweeter. I’m enamored with the concept of millions of people being wet at the same time. At rainy day recess we used to sneak outside and play anyway. We would jump in puddles and make a real mess of it. As an adult I have never regularly used an umbrella. I don't like the idea of something coming in between me and god. I will receive every blessing that is sent down and I will let it wash over me. Maybe the rain will make me better. Maybe it will make me less fearful and more consistent. Perhaps it will give me a vision so I can see what I need to do to become whole once more.