There is something oddly comforting about the reliability of rain. Everything else at the moment seems out of focus, dim, almost invisible; this world has its own pattern and frequency that my ears cannot quite hear. For here it is, mid-June, and the Filipino students are heading back to school. Over here, summer is over. One would think, after seven years abroad, that I would have become used to such chronological disruptions. After all, both Japan and Cambodia have their own seasonal rhymes and reasons that remained forever opaque to me. And yet it never ceases to surprise me, this familiar feeling that things are off-kilter, or slightly skewed, or even simply strange; I can never quite find a firm footing.
Ah, but the rain. Each day, every day, it arrives. Coming shortly after three, or perhaps leaning towards four. In familiar torrents of intensity. In wet outbursts of bravado, as if nature itself had something to prove. Long and slanting sheets of rain, dousing us all. I can walk, wet yet relieved, because what was supposed to happen did happen. I can count on this cadence, if only for a season.
