i don’t have to weep

On rainy days, I gravitate towards windows.

There’s always been something charming about droplets of water hitting everything. Maybe it’s the symphony of beats and drips that entrances me, the steady rhythm of raindrops and its muted patters against glass, but I know that I’ve always loved it.

My mother used to tell me not to stay too close. “Lightning will strike you,” she warned, as my six year old self pressed her cheek to the cool glass and admired how the rain had tainted everything a cool, dark green. “Stay away from the window.”
I’d pull myself back by an inch, and she’d sigh, knowing I would be glued to the windowsill until I fell asleep.

Countless instances of rainfall, the smell of the earth—petrichor—and chilled window panes stretch along the highway of my memories, from my childhood up until now. Scattered pieces of the years and months I’ve left behind surround me; and yet, I can barely reach out and take one.

Reminiscing is hard for me. The highway seems to dissolve the second I step on it, jerking away from my grasp. People write detailed essays and stories of their own phenomenal lives, and I sit near the windows in a busy café, raking my mind to place just why I feel nostalgic all of a sudden.

The harsh past, a tapestry woven out of memories and barbed wire. The unclear future, a carpet of mist and shadows. Evidently, this time I am choosing to go back down memory lane to dissect the shattered pieces of my childhood.

I don’t remember much. I want—can—should—must.

They come in pieces and careful brushstrokes, my own past dissolving behind me as I try to step forward somehow. I want to go home. No, what is home? I can remember nothing but my mother’s hushed warnings whenever I even glanced at a window, and the tapping of the raindrops beside me distracts and focuses me at the same time.

I feel an ache, a longing for the memories that has been locked away for years now. The rain, it always has this effect on me—reveals parts of me that I don’t even know existed, uncovers the painful truth. Maybe that’s why I like it.

My past has always been an object of great mystery; shrouded by my own subconscious trying to block it out, and I am homesick for a place that I do not recognize. I’ve gotten fragments and glimpses of my life, the one I used to live, and now I stare at the pages of my journal where the words blur together into one giant mess of the unknown.

Someone took a hammer to my still-fragile mind when I was nine and I’ve been left behind with the broken pieces of me to glue back together.

This curiosity. This insatiable urge to pine for something I’ve blocked out for years. It is as if I cannot say goodbye; I am not capable of waving someone off, or to watch them disappear over the horizon.

I want to look back.

Rainfall, it doesn’t want me to look back. It brings back all of my happy memories with it, as if trying to sate a child’s curiosity with candy so they wouldn’t eat the food you know they wouldn’t like.

My head pounds. I know my coffee is getting cold, but I can’t bring myself to pull my hand away from the window and lift the cup. I close my eyes and let my mind wander, let it try and catch the elusive slivers of my memory, the source of this lump in my throat—the yearning for a home I have never been welcome in.

I don’t have to weep. The sky's done that for me.