in the shadows and shades the rain will fall

The ceiling fan makes the light flicker, it bothers my eyes, makes these delusions more corporeal. They flicker and dart on my periphery, almost mocking, never quite within my grasp. Shades and shadows.

Air in the tropics is heavy and thick. Sometimes it hurts to breathe, the intake catches, your lungs feel weighted, your chest pinned to your back. So I put up with the flickering lights and the mocking shades, I need breezes, wisps of air that caress, not suffocate.

It's nice to actually have rain tonight. I need rain. Rain is my music, my melody. It wraps me in it's rhythm, soothes my soul, as cliche as that is.

I love rain soaked skin, the smell, the taste. It washes it all away, washes me away. Every "what if", every "if only" that I keep, is a rain drop.

When I should have gone on that bus, when I should have ran through the pouring rain and beaten on his door. When I should have said, Yes yes yes I get it. I understand. I want that too. Show me, please, show me that world. When none of those words would have been necessary at all, when all I would have needed to do was lean in and kiss him, pull him outside into the rain.

It's that night skipping home hand in hand. When he spontaneously hand picked that flower [the very same flower I still have pressed in the pages of an old diary] and a look in his eye I had never seen before. A look I hadn't recognised, I look I wore on my own face. A moment when yet again, a rain drenched kiss would have claimed that moment and made it his and mine. Had he not been a gentlemen and had I not cared so much.....the rain would have claimed us both.

Not all rain are tears of actions not taken, words unspoken and boys not quite forgotten.

Some rain is dancing, clothes clinging, questionable noises pulling at sodden shirts, giggles and the sound of Otis Redding singing I can be anything you want me to be and the feel of wet grass under my bare feet.

Some rain is watching him run in the middle of an angry storm, out in the flashes of lightning, the growl of the thunder, to return, moments later, soaked to the bone with a handful of flowers and a lopsided grin.

Some rain is a wild storm spent curled under blankets, with his head in my lap reading out loud from the dictionary like it was a novel, laughing that we somehow managed to make it seem logical, a tale spun worthy of a Penguin retro-classic cover.

Some rain is curled into each other, skin to skin beneath crisp white sheets, the only sound is our heartbeats and the rain.

Some rain is a cup of tea and the gentle glow of a monitor. The light tapping of keys and the sounds of children sleeping, a cat snoring and the soft music that soothes when my heart begins to ache.

Tonights rain is none of those things. No not quite forgotten boys, no memories made with a man half way round the world with boots lined with desert sand, no gentle snores. There are no tears, for the boys that weren't, the man that is but who is so often absent, or for lonely.

This is cleansing rain.

Forget everything you thought you knew.
Forget everything I ever said.

I want to be new to you.

2009-11-11 9:13 p.m.