Rain washes the outdoors.
I haven’t felt properly dry in a week.
Everything is sodden, swollen. Even the air is soaked through.
My skin is soft and smooth, my hair frizzed to its ends.
I can taste the moisture.
There is a moment of relief in the evening just after a rain, where it’s too cool for quick evaporation and the shower has passed, having wrung water from the air. For a moment, the cool seems dry.
I lay in my bedroom next to the air conditioning unit. It blasts cold on max, all day, all night. It drips water condensed from the air it cools, running a little stream beneath it. Beside the power chords that power it. Soaking the occasional garment or refuse in its unpredictable path. I like the stream. I offer it no solution.
I lay in my bedroom in the cold and dry. I like the shock. I will never turn the air conditioner off or down. I want to bathe in the absolute cold, see my windows fog up in contrast to the steamy world outside. I live in a rainforest, but my space permits respite. Some contrast from the world outside. A cold bath.
I lay in my bedroom smelling myself. I smell like a man. I smell like a man who has not showered for 3 days. I like smelling like a man. I don’t smell bad.
I sit in the living room. The windows are open and the rain continues. A soft patter, a wall of static, a blanket separating every dwelling. Inhibiting all humans, but the frogs and insects sing all the louder for our absence. I live in a rainforest and they let me know it.
It feels like in a hundred years nothing would remain should we leave. So aggressive is this gentle force, mulching everything. The plastic buried in decayed houses, metal rusted to red stains.
When I was young I lived in a house where every door had a lock that demanded use. One did not trust the neighbors, and even needed hard boundaries between him and his family. My parents insisted on good insulation. Summer in Texas was a flavor of hell, and central air conditioning was our manner of excising the land’s demons from our space. Indoors, I spent spring, summer, fall, and winter. I spent my time indoors, closed off, in my little cave.
In my present life I live in a large old house with no central cooling. Every window that can be opened is always open. The breeze carries the outdoors through the house. The doors are all unlocked, except the bathrooms. I smell everything. I hear everything. I feel everything. Even inside, we’re outside.
Everywhere in this house, except for my bedroom, which remains a holdover from my youth. That room, always cold, door always shut tight. The last bastion of an upbringing, a final closed door between myself and the world I’ve moved into.
Rain washes the outdoors, but in my room it runs a little river that does not touch me.
