rainfall

it is 3:41pm on Thursday the 11th of June 2015. I am standing at the large full length windows of my apartment looking out at the rain.¹ It started raining about an hour earlier, quite suddenly - without warning, one minute sunshine and the next a torrent of small droplets falling and crashing onto leaves and pavement. And where before it was reasonably sunny looking now the sky is an off-whitish, very bland and unexciting sort of hue, and the world seems similarly drained of colour from having been deprived of direct sunlight. As if the colour saturation slider of the world's photo editing app had been set to very low. Ah - yes, Grayscale. that's what they call it.

There is a dense mist that obscures the tops of the tall condominiums that surround ours. It is thick as fog, and white like clouds. Thick with condensation. This makes the buildings further away harder to see as well. The buildings as they recede into the distance become fainter, a veil of increasing opacity as they grow further away. beyond the half-erased buildings nothing can be seen except the same featureless shade of off white that reaches into the sky. the effect is surprisingly not dismal, but calming. The streets and leaves are wet, the stone and cement taking on a darker shade and shininess. The cars go up and down the boulevard leading up to the roundabout fountain, with headlights on and wipers on. There is also the speed and velocity at which the rain is falling. It is not fast and heavy like it sometimes is here, where you can hardly see them because they're moving so fast, where all you can feel is the sheer speed and fierce velocity / urgency with which the pellets bombard you / your surroundings. It is also not mild and halting like the drizzling and light showers I've grown accustomed to in the UK. It is falling at what i can only describe as a 'moderate' speed. Unhurried, neither fast nor slow. It falls at the same rate as a small phone if you were to drop it from the top floor of a condominium. There is a cool chill of air-conditioning where I am standing. Rainforest, is the word that comes to mind. There is a bough, shooting upwards vertically outside my window. It is the tallest one of its tree and stands alone, coming up roughly to the level of my chest. It stands 20 feet away, uncrowded by any other vegetation. It looks at once lonely and serene. The leaves are vaguely ovate in shape, but quite thin and dark green, slightly drooping under the pressure of repeated impact, staccato percussion of the raindrops, receiving a hundred tiny blows per second, they look like they are shivering, fluttering like little green wings on a branch.

I can hear thunder, coming it seems from far away. And it is a low grumbling, kind of guttural growl. Not sudden. And it lasts a long time. It reverebrates and echoes, seems to be travelling toward or away. It is not so much a thunderclap but like the sound of one hard, massive rocky thing grinding against another. A little like the sound of how the wheels of a heavy luggage suitcase sounds rolling at speed against the asphalt, but larger and more expansive, spacious. How unless it is right underneath you and makes you jump, we learn to tune out these sounds. The growlings of heaven. Intermittent. Behind and beneath is the noise, faint, barely audible static of rain splashing against the leaves and hard surfaces, railings, balconies, streets. It sounds soft, continuous crashing of surf, - not a pitter patter, because that implies being able to discern discrete rhythm to the noise, but the downpour is just a constant, mixing and mingling coalescing into one long uninterrupted stream of sound. the world outside whispering sssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh --

by the time i write all this down it is 4:30 and it has stopped raining. The mist has moved on and the tops of buildings are visible now. The sky is still white and boring but brighter, letting through more light. the sounds of  a noisy motorcycle's engine and chirping birds. The ground of the open air public tennis court opposite our condo is made of green clay and drying, slowly regaining its lightness of colour in mottled patches, puddles of water collecting where the ground is uneven and dips in.

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^{1. what made me stare out the window in the first place was the sense that I was missing out on the real world, (#existentialfomo) (I was looking up pictures of Uchida Maaya and watching Donald Glover's comedy central stand up special - which to be honest i can do anytime) my everyday waking life by choosing to forfeit to opt out of participation and enter the pre-made, pre-taped, exit the present and engage in mindless appreciation of online video - letting the moment pass unobserved, unexamined, uncelebrated. seemed like a sin. I look to the window and see that it is raining, and a sense of relief because i'm not missing out on sunshine so it's a kind of relief, minimises the opportunity cost, condone, mitigate the consequences of passivity. but then a voice comes and says, but why should you value the sunshine any more than overcast days, or even the phenomena of rain. Is there nothing for you to admire about it? Is your capacity for wonder and imagination really so limited. So i stood at the window and watched for a while. Trying to take in the moment before it leaves, and record down everything about it that feels real and immediate to me. what it feels exactly to be me and alive and awake at this very minute - so that in the future i can read it and be transported to this very moment in time and feel that it had not passed me by but that i have made the most of it. made the most of each moment and by extension, my life. a way of reliving but also ensuring that i live it the first time. A textural form of redemption ↩}