For a Single Drop of Rain ____ AKSHR

For a Single Drop of Rain

 

It’s still raining; it’s been raining for six hours, 

relentlessly, remorselessly.

No one’s out; the city is empty, silent.

 

The water pools on the sidewalks, in the gutters.

It collects in puddles, filling up.

It overflows, pouring into drains.

The rain falls and falls and falls.

I’ve been watching it for hours now, mesmerized by its repetition.

It falls in sheets and gusts of wind push it around like a force of nature—

a force that can be seen, felt, heard and smelled.

It falls through the sky and onto my windowpane with a deafening roar—

a sound I can feel deep inside my chest as if it were a heartbeat—

a sound that reminds me of my own mortality.

I shut my eyes to escape this feeling but all I see are raindrops falling from the sky, hitting pavement and running down gutters to form small rivers and lakes that pool on the ground below where they can never be seen again until they flood our homes with water we can no longer control or contain; water that’s so heavy it collapses our foundations; water that takes everything away from us until there is nothing left to salvage or rebuild because we have no idea how much time has passed when we finally wake up from this dreamless sleep in which we are drowning, alone in our misery until the sun rises over us again and we remember what life really means to us with one single drop of rain at last…

___ AKSHR