I couldn’t sleep last night so I present you with a little 2am writing…
It’s the strangest thing
I exist between incarnations of water
In a city caressed by two liquid bodies
The Rio Magdalena feeding into the Caribbean Sea
The air too often feels like it dreams to be water
With the way it sticks to my skin
Joining my sweaty contribution to this liquid world
Yet for all the two and a half months I’ve called this lively city home
I haven’t felt the rain
There have been days where I thought for sure
This is the one
The first downpour
I’ve readied myself to be a true Colorado kid and splash in the puddles
But it hasn’t come
And I’ve been confused
How can it be this humid
Yet never collect itself enough to fall from the sky in little pearls of watery crystal?
The locals tell me, “Just wait. Soon it won’t stop.”
Yet I struggle to comprehend
With my limited human mind
How a place I feel I know
Can have this alternate personality
A personality of such monstrous rains that the streets become dangerous rivers
Then yesterday
Yesterday it happened
Yesterday, I looked out my bedroom window and packed an umbrella
The air hung especially low that morning
Gray clouds resting their full bellies just above the rooftops
And the dream of the air felt visceral
My rainbow stir fry was the first to be hit by the drops
As I sat outside my usual lunch time cafe
Causing a quick debate between shelter and surrendering to the wetness
Yet in the time the electrical signals took to cross their neuronal highways
The rain laughed at my decision
The lunch time stupor of campus shattered
Forming a hubbub of unprepared college students seeking refuge
Tucking under my umbrella
I listened to the growing fury of the drops
Fleeing the sky as if chased by some heavenly wrath
Soon, I too found shelter
With a crowd of rain speckled shirts and glistening dark hair
Then it was gone
Leaving the world to settle back into its armchair
Lazily going about its day
It wasn’t until later
As I crossed the cobblestone courtyard
That I noticed the air
At last it had become one with its long-held fantasy
Every inch of my skin felt the steam rising off the bricks in the afternoon sun
Almost seeing the drops reversing their earlier flight from the sky
Giving me the uncanny sense I might be raised up with them
Raised up
Into the freshly washed sky
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