Watching the rain

Sudden heavy afternoon rain. You cannot sit still. You open the only window you can open in the air-conditioned 6th floor office you work. The wind rushes in, like all that you have kept at bay, but has not really gone away. Cool. fresh. Down below in the flooded school playground, boys are playing football in the rain, wild, happy. You would give half your life to be there with them. You are so happy.


One of the boys in another team comes to stand by you. All that you know of him is that he is in the football team. You point out the boys playing in the rain. And he starts talking about memories of playing football in the rain with close friends back home. Back home, where you could be Just You, not someone you are required to be. Deep Nostalgia, freed from the bonds of office etiquette, the unwritten rule that you do not speak to people from other teams. You stand and listen, surprised, yet not surprised at the sudden openness. You are used to this, people telling you the deepest of things, without warning. He goes on, looking down, dreamy-eyed, and you visualize the whole football-in-the-rain happiness.

We stand and watch the rain, in all its wild gay abandon, through this little gap in our cloistered, regimented lives.

The rain makes friends of strangers, dissolves all the stupid boundaries we make between ourselves in our so-fragile lives. Which could be snuffed out, on the most ordinary of days. Just Like That.