Rain

• Andrew Shim, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2008

A dewdrop of water tickles my nose, and scurries down the side of my face, like a fleeing ant.

It’s raining again.

I find my elysian in times like these. Nature is like an all enveloping blanket, one that warms me when I am cold, and cools me when I am burning to the touch with feverish thoughts. I feel anger, anxiety and frustration slipping away, away as the rain falls, falls, and I am falling with it. I am letting go of myself; my personality flows into the abyss of nothingness, the perfection of nature swallowing my flaws, overcoming me wholly. I am on the brink of myself; merging with nature, blurring into the air, wind and sky.

I am diminishing up into infinity, into euphoria – treading past beyond the petty problems of humanity, assimilating with the oncoming night stars, my body sparkling like the night sky.

The water is slick and cold, coating my skin amorously, washing away my sweat and the grit on my garments. My voice is the sound of water hitting the leaves of trees, and I tremble when the leaves shake, I sigh when the wind shudders through the dying branches of autumn.

My shoes are a shining yellow, the rubber they are made from wet and slippery, lustrous. The color makes for a stark contrast against the black tar road beneath the soles of my shoes. I wander off balance, letting myself stray from the abandoned road to the grassy wildness.

Tilting my head up, I close my eyes, and sway - smiling at the simple placidity of it all. Oak branches spatter me in their shadows and I twirl, bathing in the calm and in the rain.

I can feel the droplets – each, like an alacritous bead, kissing every inch of my skin and rolling around exotically, tickling me with their chilled fingers, so goose bumps form along my forearms and on the back of my neck. Being coated from my wet stomach to my numbing toes to my clenched, white knuckled fingers and my tomato-red cheeks makes me squeal in delight. My clothes stick to my body as if they were glued crudely onto me, and I shiver with the cold, thrilled by it.

A fine mist coalesces around me, the rain spraying into my laughing eyes. In this world, where humanity persists in existence of chaos and chains of society, I feel so smothered and bare, vacant. But with a little fall of rain, I'm hardly hurting now. My hair, now wet, sings in delight as ablutions wash me, cleanse me. I'm no longer alone - I am free.

The rain is like an adrenalin rush injection. I am addicted and abused, and I abuse this.

But I am my happiest this way. Here, in a place separated from society, I find my paradise.