Hot Night in the City
It’s been hot all day.
Hot.
One hundred percent humidity hot.
When I walked out my door this morning I left home without an umbrella. But as I left I realized it was raining.
So I opened my apartment and grabbed my oversized overpriced umbrella for the walk.
But it wasn’t really raining. The air was so full of moisture that the moisture was pulling out and touch the ground. Earth that seemed dry and parched, but wasn’t. Air so full of water that there was nowhere else for the water to go so it felt like it was raining.
I kept the umbrella over my head for most of the mile to work, until finally with the sweat pouring out of my pours I realized how foolish it was. I was more wet from the just walking then I’d be from the nth of rain that might be falling.
I turned the air conditioning on in my classroom and taught classes.
I pretended not to notice when the students came in and complained of the heat.
It didn’t feel that bad.
I walked home carrying my oversized overpriced umbrella feeling foolish. It was foolish.
I got home and worked out and the sweat pored and pored. I felt old and tired and wet with it. I finally gave up and turned on the air conditioning in my apartment. It took almost three hours for me to feel any effect.
I listened to music.
I read a book.
Then I hear the distant rumble of thunder less then an hour before midnight. Thunder rolling in.
And suddenly the sky opens and it pours down the rain and I listen to it, and it is beautiful. I look out the single square window of my apartment and I can see the lightening flash and I rejoice. Here come the monsoon rains. I’ve missed the rains. Has it been a year already.
I open the door to the laundry porch and I feel the wash of warm heavy wet air. The rain has not broken the heat at all. It’s still thirty degrees around me, but now it’s wet with water that pours straight down horizontal in cascades.
I walk out my apartment door with my glass of tequila in hand, my hair braided up like Pocahontas, and a red bathrobe and nothing else.
I walk out my door in the dark barefoot and stand under the rain and it splashes and mixes with my tequila making the glass foggy and my breath comes harder.
The rains is pure and beautiful.
I suddenly feel pure and beautiful.
It comes hard and fast and heavy and I stand in it and rejoice.
And hope my landlord doesn’t come down the stairs.
Now it is moving past a bit, but it will still be there when I wake up in the morning. As the heat will be there, as my oversized, overpriced umbrella will be there, along with my wilting red bathrobe and Pocahontas braids.
Doesn’t matter.
It was beautiful.
*Written while quite inebriated. Unedited.