How to Love a Rainstorm

What my mother sees is not all that he is.

Sometimes when it storms

I run upstairs and prop open the window 

Just for a moment I can stand there smelling the tangy wind and

Hearing the impatient raindrops dive toward the ground in a symphony

My mother says I will catch my death one day

Of what I am not sure

The wind or the cold or the rain

But I think what she fears most is the leaning out the window and the rush of filling ones lungs

With something that isn't safe

That isn't tame

Something that tastes slightly harsh like the burnt edges of the sky and sweet like the beginnings of spring falling into my pores 

Something unexpected 

When I am alone and it rains I put on my best shoes and dance

There's a liberation in feeling the frigidness soak through your skin but it cannot drench your smile 

Rainy days remind me to feel 

Falling in love

Is technically the same thing as throwing open the window when the rain is coming in sideways

Lungs overwhelmed with the scent of things stirred up from the earth and other things pouring from the open sky 

Eyes blurred but senses acute

Wind whipping through your hair and your fingers pressed to the windowsill

Love makes me want to climb out, shimmy down the outer walls that enclose the confines of this house and dance around the puddle spotted driveway, mud sticking to my bare toes

My mother never walks in the rain without an umbrella

When she met him, she told me to shelter myself

To love him carefully from behind a protective layer of apathy, if at all

But I like to tear down the sidewalk, soaking the cuffs of my jeans 

Damp hair sticking to my cheeks

Because I'm in love with him and

He is not the kind of person who wears a raincoat 

He is lightning edges and intensity 

Mother thinks I am standing in the middle of a lake in a thunderstorm

She is never there to see the times when he is a drizzle that blankets my thoughts in cotton and sings me to sleep

All the moments when he is music

Replenishment to the cracked layers of my soul that forgot many springs ago how to need

When he is a soft glow of hope

When he is mist clinging to the flowers I see every morning

He is the downpour that washed the ash ridden tear streaks from my cheeks that first afternoon we met

He drowned out the static with a drumbeat 

Rain on a tin roof

Mother asks how I can bear to love a rainstorm

How I can think I was saved by a flood

I tell her he didn't save me

He wasn't the one who planted hope seeds in my skin

I did that long ago when the soil packed around my heart was still full of blood drying around the roots of dead trees

I planted them there and prayed and prayed for them to germinate

I grew myself a scraggly skinny lopsided hope tree

It's just that

When I met him, flowers began to blossom on it and

The soil thawed and softened

I told her, Mother,

You can be a stubborn gardener

But sometimes alone is not strongest

Sometimes we pray for rainclouds 

They bring life from the most unconventional of sources

From the ominous unknown comes a soothing gift

He may look like a flood

But he is a spring thaw

He is the cloud cover that blesses hot summer afternoons

Make no mistakes, he sears like lightning sometimes

But the truth is I do to

Even the best of us char the earth we love sometimes

And together we paint rainbows

If my mother looked up at the sky 

Maybe she wouldn't worry so

About my fragile heart

Sometimes you have to dance alone under the open sky

Wash the dust from your tired eyes

Open the window when the rain is coming in sideways

And remember how to feel

There will be a rainbow

It comes from the most unexpected of dark places

The clouds are not omens

They are the precursors to life

All of us stumble into each other in the dark

Unexpected bringers of futures we must learn to share

Sometimes we need 

Sometimes we are weak

Sometimes we find each other in our thirst for human company

Sometimes we are rainstorms, and sometimes we are the parched earth

Does that make us walking destruction?

The collision of two opposites?

Or does it just make us alive

Misunderstood painters of spring

We were all once children playing in puddles 

Finding the beauty in the messiest of things

When did we learn to stop running in the rain?

I choose him for his lullaby tapping on my skylight at night

When he is the last thought clinging to my eyelashes before sleep

I choose him for the clean smell of spring

For washing my skin of stubborn solitude in the rain

I choose him for the occasional thunderstorms

And the reconciliation of a rainbow in their wake

I am sorry mother, I will not bring an umbrella as a shield

If love is a rainstorm then

I want to always remember how it feels