I think it started with the storm.
You get them in summer, don’t you? When the heat breaks. Rain. Rain of Biblical proportions. And you sit inside with a mug of something hot and you listen to the raindrops on the glass, rat-tat-tat, and you feel… cosy.
I dreamed that first night. I don’t remember much of it. Bits and pieces. Colours. Noises. Smells more than anything. That ozone stink of a storm, right, but something else. Something… it’s gone, and the harder I try and reach for it the fuzzier it gets. But that’s most of my thoughts right now. Like someone ran through the library and yanked all the books off the shelves. I can’t find can’t find can’t find can’t find can’t find
Oh.
cold and wet and chilled to the bone to the bones through the skin through the skin and deeper
That’s what I remember.
Sorry. I have moments, now and then. Soon I think all I’ll have are moments.
But don’t listen.
Don’t.
It started with the storm.
We had a long hot week, the kind people used to call dog days and now just pretend it’s normal. About seven in the evening, we heard the first rumble, and I actually smiled. Finally, something to drive the heat away.
It rained all that evening. All that night. It was raining in my dream. When I woke up the next morning, I could still hear it tapping at my window like a kid with a BB gun, notice me, pay attention. I rolled over. Weekend, lie-in, you know the drill.
But I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t get back there. It was still dark out, rain clouds, grey and miserable. It wasn’t that. It was the rat-tat-tat. Notice me. Pay attention.
So I just lay there.
Have you ever listened to the rain? Really listened? I don’t mean your rainy-day playlist. Listen. At first it sounds like one thing, but don’t be fooled. It’s a chorus. There are so many voices. So many so many so many
scream and scream and the rain will take that too and add it to its many voices after all where did you think they came from the heralds of the tempest
My grandad used to tell me his knee ached before a storm. Like a barometer. He broke it pretty bad in the Falklands. Not the war, I mean. Just on holiday. Bird-watching trip. 1992. Tripped and fell. Just another meaningless battle scar.
I think I might be broken.
Head on the pillow, staring up at the ceiling, trying so hard not to reach for my phone like the tech-zombie slave we’re all becoming, that was when I heard it for the first time.
The voices. So many of them, all whispering the same thing.
can you hear us/can you hear us/can you hear us
And I said yes. To nothing. To the empty room. To the ceiling. But that was enough.
It rained for three days. A big old blow out storm that wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t move on, just hung there in the sky and glowered and all that time it spoke to me. Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, oh, you could be so much more in the eye and the heart of the storm, oh, aren’t you restless, tossing and turning, oh, oh, let us show you, let us show you a place in the sky.
I know you’ll think I’m crazy. And you’re probably not wrong.
Maybe I’ve always been this way. Looking for my reflection in puddles. Skipping stones across the lake. Looking for shapes in the clouds. Maybe I’m the kind of person who was always going to end up saying yes.
On the last day of the storm the rain told me to climb.
Get up high, it said, somewhere you can breathe.
I took the stairs all the way to the roof. It was getting dark by then, not just the clouds. Night. Three days of rain washed away the lingering heat and I shivered in the t-shirt and the dark and I waited.
Look, it said, right there.
I didn’t see anything.
Into the storm, it said.
So I looked into the storm. Into the clouds like a thick grey mass like stitched-together skin.
Look past, it said.
And I looked and looked and looked and looked and
in the dream the sky opens like a jack-in-the-box all spring and sprayed-on smile and sudden movements
And I ran.
The raindrops screamed at me every step. Go back. Turn back. Turn your face to the sky. See us. We are ready and waiting and prickling with the desire to know you fill you be you.
You you you you you
you small thing you insect you earthbound little mote don’t you know how lucky you are to hear us
I ran and ran and ran and whimpered, all of me revolting against that sight.
Halfway down the third flight of stairs I slipped.
I think - for a few seconds - I dreamed again.
When I woke up, sobbing, at the bottom of the stairs, a huge bruise flowering across my shoulder where I must’ve slammed into the landing, I realised I could smell it. The storm was breaking.
It hasn’t rained properly since. Sunny days, warm evenings, long nights. But I know what that means. Dry days mean wet days, and the longer you go the worse it’ll be.
We’ve had showers. A few drops here and there. Every drop on the window screams at me, you know what to do, where to go, where to look. I… I feel like a beetle who stopped shedding its skin halfway.
I’m turning into my grandad. I can tell when it’s rained without looking. The smell keeps getting stronger. Ozone. Petrichor. Blood-of-the-gods. I don’t know what I saw in the sky. I don’t want to know. But I keep waking up while it’s still dark, sheets soaked in something which isn’t sweat or piss. The smell keeps getting stronger. It’s my smell now. I am I am I am I am
changing like a wolf in the moon or a seal on the shore you can be honest with us
There is, I think, a pretty fine line between lucid and lunatic.
And I only have until the next storm.