I feel the rain like it were blood through my veins, watching the clouds spread out along the sky in their depths, their heaviness. I’ve sat in front of my window, still wearing my robe on early Saturday mornings, hoping the wren will sing. But night leaves its darkness behind, reminding me that winter is for hibernation. I lay back then, reading and listening, the drops landing on the lychee tree’s waxy leaves, sliding along rooftops, gurgling into the small streams forming in the streets. 

I want to go outside. I want to get outside of my head. To play in the sunshine. But I stay in. Finding things to do with my hands, sweeping the floors, wiping down countertops, and making my way back to the couch in this blanket of gray, back into books to occupy my churned mind. I have been feeling the rain between my bones, places within me slipping, washing out thoughts and feelings that have stuck to the underside of my ribcage, behind my heart, the back of my neck, and down along the sinews of my shoulders. And in the rain I have cried. My tears flow into the streets; I haven’t been able to stop. The rain goes on through the night, tears down my cheeks landing on my pillow. In the dark the streetlights stand bright and alone, droplets falling heavy along the asphalt. I want to be washed into the sewers, to move into the ocean, to float away along with everything that was left behind, where I hope I could simply relax. Out in the ocean I wouldn’t care about what I had let go of, the great body hugging against mine. 

The rain has closed me into my mind only to signal how much I need to release, washing out the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs I clung to, the things that became baked into me as if they were right, true, and infallible. And I am learning to unstick myself, releasing my grip on what I’ve come to accept as the way things are.

I stay awake thinking about these things, the life I have built. How I have come to live within the routine I have created for myself without questioning whether this is still what I want. And in the slowness, constrained to the four walls, to doing less, I am uncovering how much of what has been is not what I want it to be. The rain illuminates these choices and tells me to clear it all out. To come clean with a deeper truth, to align with the identity that has gotten lost among the structures outside of myself. I have felt the rain between the sheets, long lines of water dripping from my hair, reddening my cheeks. In those moments of sleep, it whispers to me. 

When will the rain stop?