Rain

It’s pissing down. Like that time when you’d been out for too long, drank too many lattes and, getting home, crashed through the house clumsily, dropping keys and bags and stuff onto the hard wood floor as you ran. Eventually, exploding into the toilet, you pissed like a firehose, strong enough to break the porcelain, long enough for friends to start timing you, and your body letting it go in waves as it relaxed and the world started to smile again.

I awoke this morning to a bruised, indigo sky, which cracked and emptied its fulness in an Easterly torrent. Driving hard from West to East, the rain threw itself forwards, racing through the space between sky and earth, leaning back into a sharp 45-degrees the better to gain purchase on the world.

Windless, the rain sprinted along in pulses, forming misty waves that crashed across and leaped off the tiled roof, exploding in a misty waterfall into the yard. The same pulsing wave sliding across car roofs, peppering the rough, now opalescent, black asphalt.

Stronger, harder, softer, stronger.

The bruised, indigo sky bled itself pale blue, and as the rain eased, lorikeets mustered in the fiery foliage of introduced trees for this exciting event chorused in apparent joy.

Gathering, washing, singing.

Australians love the rain. We learned it from our birds. We sit and enjoy it without mentioning it to each other; the bush superstition  don’t mention the rain or it’ll stop  allowing us to enjoy it in silence together.

As the rain rushed past it filled the unforgiving, concrete gutters man imposed on the world. And as it eased, the collected water rushed back the other way, west, to the sea.