October 12, 2005
Blue rain

Summer flitted past with barely a backward glance, and there I was, gawking in its wake. The rain encouraged barely yellowing leaves to fall, peppering the pavement with nature's leftover confetti. Whose wedding? Is autumn but a brief marriage between summer and snow?

We shared an umbrella between us and raised random points of conversation as we navigated our way through waterways that had sprouted within grooves in the sidewalk and lakes that have begun to form at each street corner. Rainy days make people moody; greyness is a contagious state. But perhaps, it is simply because sunny days draw attention the brightness and vividness of the world external to us such that we forget ourselves, while rain — rain closes off that world with dull, relentless curtains of raindrops and we are forced to reconcile with the discomfort our own individual existences, shrouded by an eternity of wet.

In the morning I had walked into the lift the same time as a colleague from a different company, and he was so thoroughly soaked that we couldn't help but to grin at each other. I looked mostly dry, if you didn't pay attention to the sudden deeper blue of my jeans from below my knees and the fact that the sides of my jacket sleeves were gleaming wet.

"I think I should get one of those." He pointed to my dripping umbrella. "Where do you walk from?"

"Just the métro," I said, waving in the general direction of the station vaguely five minutes' walk away.

He looked incredulous. "You get that wet walking from the métro?!"

I like rain. It makes for a universal topic of conversation.

Posted by sniffles at 12:44 AM | Comments (5)