Raintaker

A fat wind out, and I began by noting how dryly it budged me, how my hair rose along the contours of its skin. Wind: what’s left of a week pockmarked with rain. I know little of the weather except that we’ve got us some distorted climate. It’s not all nature’s fault either, I’ve been told. Myself, I’ve been spoiling for rains two months going. My family knows it, my editors know it, and my friends know it. Only people around me who’ve not heard my wet wish were my students. The week’s blessed rain ended with them. Last week, when they defeated me with malice or neglect, my retaliatory sermons ventured toward the climate: how the distension of the Russian novels may be due to the searing cold of their country, how the English concept of “gentleman” may have sprouted from a wet calendar, and how Filipino disposition may be as famously sunny as it is exactly because of tropical displacement. I asked if the shock of the cold triggered their chemical melancholia and, through some convoluted reasoning or other, the winds caused them to forget the one sheet of paper I asked them to bring. A light object. Malice or neglect? So I marked them absent, told them they’re better off home writing novels. Then the rains stopped. Wind or no wind, I’d be happy a bit more rain. Rain to go with the coffee. Rain to raise the dam levels. Rain, maybe to splash, hopefully to reveal the invisibles – those who were taken, perhaps forever. Our dear disappeared, youth too principled for their own good, too damned diligent. How should I ask them to come home? Or how to court skywater to mourn for them? The wind that ended the week was still too small to have a voice.