Rain On The Roof Of The Conference Room

"rainworld you will always be a tourist" - bladee

Light rain is falling against the roof of the conference room this Monday morning. It feels like it’s falling directly against the square ceiling tiles above me, and if I were to push out one of the ceiling tiles, a hole to the sky would open up and the rain would bring in the real world with it, but that's not true. In the morning standup we’re discussing plans for the week but I’m thinking about times I’ve been rained on.

Rain #1. April 2017, coldhealing age 19, sophomore year of college. I had just been accepted for my first internship and needed to take a drug test for the comfort of the bureaucracy. The drug test company was two miles off the west edge of campus, into the normal person world. I liked walking and didn't like waiting, so through my college years I refused to learn the bus system, and even a destination this far didn't compel me to do so. My dorm was on the east end of campus, so I strategically picked a day on which my last class was on the west end. The weather on that day wasn’t shaping up great, but I ignored that. From the western lecture hall I walked to the drug test facility, wearing my backpack full of English major books and my laptop. While I was inside the building waiting for the testing center employees to be ready for me it started raining. The rain only got stronger as my drug test continued. I had to get back to my dorm to work on homework, so I braved the storm for the three mile walk back. My route took me through the big graveyard on the southwestern edge of campus near the football field, where the names of the players who score touchdowns boomed out over the graves of the dead on October Saturdays. On this April afternoon the graves were dyed darker gray by the water and giant puddles had formed at the bottom of the small midwestern hills. I got back to my dorm with my clothes completely soaked, sticking to my body, and I had to go in the shower to get them off. My laptop was fine but my copies of Taleb’s Antifragile and Alcott’s Little Women were damaged by the rain coming through my backpack. I left them in the windowsill of my dorm to dry. 

Rain #2. February 2019, coldhealing age 21, senior year of college. In my final semester I only needed one class to graduate, since I had intentionally stopped one class short the prior semester. I took three classes because I wanted to have fun, but I had a lot of free time. I’d use that free time to go on walks any time the winter cold slightly warmed. Usually that would be in the afternoons, at the high temperature of the day, but one Saturday evening the temperature unexpectedly surged to 50 degrees at 11pm. I was in my apartment, probably on Twitter, and decided to get out and go for a walk. I went to a swingset about half a mile away. Mitski is about the power of wearing all black at night so I was wearing all black here, black sweater, black athletic shorts, and my black tevas. For a while it was beautiful, I was on the swingset feeling the warmth, warm like early spring. But a change in temperature often comes with precipitation. The warm surge was broken by pouring rain, and it grew colder. For about five minutes I stayed on the swingset in the pouring rain, listening to Mitski. I can’t remember which song but I hope it was “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars” and it maybe was. But rain seeps into you. The magical shield that I felt wore off and I had to get off the swings. I was so cold on the way back that I had to take off my soaking wet black sweater, and the cold water felt better falling directly against my skin. 

Rain #3. May 2020, coldhealing age 22, freshman year of the real world. I was moved back home and my entire family was in my childhood house due to “lockdown”. I liked to go for long walks around the neighborhoods, the same way I did in college. One of my favorites was a walk where I could cut through an adjacent neighborhood and use their access point to a large park, a park a few miles away that as a kid I would normally drive to. It felt powerful to circumvent the driving on a much more direct path, to see the real distance between two points. One day when I was leaving my mom told it was going to rain soon, and that I maybe should wait. I went anyways, and it rained after about forty-five minutes, when I had already gotten to the park. Under the tree cover the rain wasn't so bad. As the rain was starting, I saw a huge turkey, with its feathers puffed up, trying to get somewhere safe before the rain really came down. When I first saw the turkey with a glance my instant thought was it was a cultist, a short man in a long robe, but I attribute that to the ominous feeling of change in barometric pressure. Maybe that’s why the turkey was scared too, puffed up to make himself look bigger to predators. He maybe thought I was some an evil cultist, and maybe I was. I had Moby-Dick with me and I tried to read it under the tree in the rain, and I felt like Whitman’s ideal reader of Leaves of Grass in that moment, exploring America while reading its literature. It didn't rain that hard and what rain there was I was protected from, by the mid-spring leaves. 

One of the most famous scenes in Anna Karenina is when Levin cuts the grass with serfs in the rain. Levin is a rich landowner, he has no need to work alongside the peasants, but he does it because he loves them. He slices grass in the hot summer sun, and the rain comes as jubilant relief that cools him down and lets him keep going. He goes inside, and a minor character with his nose in books questions how Levin could stay out there in the rain, when it looks so painful and cold. One of my favorite brief images in 2666, a book of brief images, is when the Mexican literature professor Amalfitano takes a math textbook and leaves it out in the rain, to show it what the real world is. I’ve been talking about the magic of rain but rain isn’t always magical, it can be cold and uncomfortable and make you sick. It can only be magical if you're ready to face it. But almost everything in life is magical if you're ready to face it. They say that rain on your wedding day is bad luck, and I think that's very true. If you aren't able to either manifest away or deal with the consequences of fate in its simplest form of weather, you may have trouble with the larger die of fate you have just cast. 

Stay dry, or stay wet, whichever you choose.