It was the middle of winter. The run up to the big C-Day. I was sat at my desk, empty screen in front of me, staring at my rain-painted window with neither disdain nor delight. My brain had been in some form of fog for a few weeks now leaving me in a perpetual state of anxious-yet-can’t-think-of-a-damn-decent-or-intelligent-thing-to-say, that I just couldn’t for the life of me shift. So there I was: watching those little droplets of water slither and slide, navigating their way down the glass of my window before falling to the moss-covered ledge in a spectacle of minute splashes that would leave an ant running for it’s life.
As a very young child, whilst still under the guise of Christianity, I used to think that rain was God crying from heaven. I felt some form of unexplainable guilt, like the world had done wrong and I was left absorbing the sins of us all. I would see the rain and feel sadness. It would, to quote Barbra Streisand, rain on my parade. Looking back it now seems odd that that in light of lacking an explanation for the existence of rain, I turned to God for the ever omnipotent answer.
Later in childhood as I began to learn and understand more of the fundamentals of life, the world and science, I rejected my own Gods-tears theory. Thus alleviating the guilt or sadness I carried for humanity. (Or maybe just myself? I often felt the rain was the result of my own shortcomings). And so I would run freely around my primary school field, wearing pink gingham school dresses and frilly white socks, enjoying the innocence of those raindrops.
As a teenager I discovered makeup, straighteners and self-awareness AKA caring too much about my appearance: and lost my love for the rain. It became a nuisance. A metaphor for misery. The pathetic fallacy of my teenage hardships. I was that girl who never had an umbrella but would always sacrifice heat for the sake of non-frizzy hair and impeccable makeup. In those awkward years of self-discovery one of life’s fundamental cycles, water, was just an annoyance to my first-world-life. Straightened hair in the rain? What a hassle. First world problems at it’s finest.
At the turn of adulthood I left the UK in search of myself. I lived in Asia and felt true, monsoon rains for the very first time. It was spine-tinglingly electrifying. Soaking to the bone. It breathed life into the world and was a saviour from the most unbearable heat. We would sit and watch it sweep a path through the world as a block of grey in the sky. You could see it coming from miles away, hear it’s heavy fall and smell the sweetness before it even touched your bare skin. I rediscovered how to love rain: how to foresee it coming by the feel of the air and not a weather-app, how to work in monsoon conditions and still get my daily jobs done, and how to enjoy the rain for all that it gave back to the world.
But there I was. Back in England looking at the same rains that occur here as anywhere else in the world. Watching it from behind the glass of my room, in the flat I rent and the comfort I have built for myself. Pondering the rain.
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