rain rain go away

Sometimes a small drizzle of rain is welcome, thin and misty while the air is hot — like a garden sprinkler pouring from above. More often, though, it weighs you down: stringy hair clinging to your neck, heavy jackets damp at the cuffs, soaked socks that make your bones shiver.

It becomes uninspiring when it lasts this long, when the days offer nothing but endless tapping against the window. Spring arrives in shades of grey and mauve, the grass limp and bloated with water. The rain moves in two ways: sometimes in quick spurts that invite the sun back for a moment, warming the air just enough for coats to be unbuttoned and shaken loose, causing brief showers of their own. Other times it settles in for days like today — endless and unmoving.

Delicate as a droplet may be, it overpowers everything else. Wind slips through cracks in the front door, curling into the eaves and wrapping the house in cold. Dry patches where picnic benches were meant to be built become shallow ponds filled with nothing but wetness — uninteresting even to the most curious child. No tadpoles, no lily pads, only a sandstone rock slowly dissolving into the water, turning it the colour of weak tea.

It is not the rain itself that feels depressive. It is the inability to move beyond it, and the wanting that disappears in its presence. A bottle of Aperol waits unopened. A sundress still hangs with its tag attached. Beside them sits a jacket too heavy for spring, unpacked once again from the winter clothes box.