May Rain

I remember where I was when the rain started that year. It was the fifth of May and it didn’t stop until June. When I say it didn’t stop, I mean it quite literally. There was no break; no smatterings of showers; no fluctuation in consistency. Just water and water and water.

Obscure, gloomy clouds drifted discretely into the sky that morning without anyone really noticing, except of course, for general murmurs of complaint about the evident delay of summer.

But I noticed.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the day before the rain started. I walked across the meadow and into the wood behind the house, as I often did. It was colder than I would have expected at that time of year, but the pasture was awash with the colours of Spring. Friendly yellow nodding buttercups and daisies; little dashes of delicate, eggshell brooklimes; offset with harsh, large, bristly poppies – though even they were barely less hospitable. It wasn’t until after I had walked past the orchard of trees bearing sweet, succulent little pears - through the wood – alive too with blossom and affability – and arrived at the footpath on the other side – that I really started to feel that something was – what was the word? -

That, I remember, is when I looked up and saw them – the clouds - convening conspiratorially- a secret army waiting in ambush – slowly and slyly - and I knew – felt it in the depths of my very essence – that something important was happening. By the time they had all come together the sky was bulging with black, shape-shifting mountains, come to alter the very fabrics of life. I felt this keenly as I watched them merge and shift and converge. I was moved and afraid, watched in reverence and admiration.

As I watched I felt a single drop on my arm.

Then another.

Then another.

And another and another and another and another.

Then, in scarcely a breath, the world was filled with it. Everywhere rain, rain; down from the clouds, up from the ground; tangled and merging with the vital green leaves on the branches of the trees; enduring; consuming; embracing.

Something happened within the secret walls of that rain. It bore down upon me – pelted, trickled, gushed, clung, dispersed – around and through me and as it did I felt the twisting aching pang of something crunch violently in my lower torso. Still on the edge of the wood and so wet – so very wet – that dryness had become a distant and abstract concept and the moving swirl of the rain my only reality.

Conscious thought abandoned me. I violently pulled and scraped at the white dress clinging to my body – my slippers were kicked away – and it was off. I wanted to be as close to the rain as possible. I needed – needed - to feel it on my skin – oh!- the way it touched me. Tousle, mania and awakening all; what happened between myself and the rain that day was sacred.

Father. Teacher. Master. Lover. God – it cleansed me and held me; baptised me; fucked me; deflowered, devoured me. Comforted, caressed and debased me. It roared and raged and spurted and spilt and dripped and trickled. It hit and pushed and pulled and stroked and felt. It cherished me and ravished me; taught and opened and released me in a fraught and embryonic dance. And in it I was reborn.

For days – weeks – I awoke and the rain was still with me; we were still as one. I awoke in the morning and heard the forceful pattering drone and sighed with relief and something tugged at me – hard – from the inside - deep within and it was peace and it was pleasure. And so the rain stayed.

Until one day, of course, it stopped.

For a long time, I was unable to understand the depth or magnitude of my grief, nor certainly to express it. It was a sharp but quiet grief that bore away at me from the inside and cast me ever into a state of depth and melancholy, not present in the world around me but always away – away. Back in that May rain.

I asked someone again today, ‘Do you remember that May? Do you?’

Rain with that virility surely must have claimed more souls than just mine.

‘Yes the rain – the rain that month. So many years ago. Yes, yes, of course I remember. Apocalyptic, relentless.’

‘I remember that month – that was a clear signal of the power of the gods.’

‘I remember that month – that rain displaced time and shifted the balance of all life – off kilter.’

‘Of course I remember. It was a cleansing – a baptism – '

-was what I expected them to say, every time I asked.

But all I ever got really was a blank stare, sometimes flecked with slight notes of pity or irritation.