Why Rain Falls

            It was raining outside. Raen knew that it was raining because she could taste it on her tongue and feel it in her fingertips. Sure enough, when she bothered to open her eyes, the rain was there, outside her window, streaking down the pane. She tried not to play the race game, where she watched each drop as it fell and hoped that it would be the first to reach the bottom of the glass.

            She did not want to play the game because it made something deep inside her hollow chest ring, as if it were a gong that had just been struck. It made her tremble and it made her empty and she was not going to let that happen again.

            The door to the backyard was unlocked and Raen wondered if she had left it like that all night. Probably. She had just woken up. But it did not matter. Now was not the time to worry, because the door was made of glass and she could see the raindrops racing down it, each one trying desperately to keep up enough momentum so that it would not be stopped. Each one leaving behind a tail of itself. They ripped themselves apart in their mad dash. Faster and faster and faster because if they slowed down, they would be caught. Stuck on a window with a path of their torn body laid out behind them to show where they had been, where they could never go again, and what they had lost as the laws of the universe demanded they carry on.

            Gasping, Raen opened the door and threw herself into the water falling from the heavens onto this black ground.

            It was a warm rain. Warmed by the sun it had been so close to and maintained by the atmosphere it tumbled from. It slapped against Raen’s skin and matted down her hair but it was the same temperature as her body and she wondered if she could just lay down on the ground and let it mistake her for this heated water that was her namesake. Let the black earth swallow her whole, into its hungry core. She would become part of the cycle of the world. Her life would give life to plants and the animals that ate them.

            She wondered if she would feel anything when it happened. Would she cry out in terror-she couldn’t even remember what terror felt like-and pain? Or would it be peaceful? This same rung-gong peace that was all-consuming and a little bit sad but mostly smothering and deadly?

            This apathy.

            She looked up and the sky whirled above her. The rain did not look the same when seen from this angle. It looked like dots of night that had shaken loose and realized their mistake only as physics took its prize.

            The water splashed into her eyes-stinging her-but there was still no difference in temperature. Did that mean that the clouds were as warm as her body? Maybe she could go up to the clouds and live there.

            She closed her eyes and imagined doing it. She used the dust and condensation to plaster herself against the  grey wall of the sky. The ground was far away, washed to a dull brown by distance. Raen would not make the mistake that the night sky had. She would never shake herself loose. This was where Raen belonged, up in the clouds.

            But no. There was no time for such foolish things as this. There were things that she could not leave behind. There were people who needed her and here she was out in the rain, letting herself forget that this was not who she was. No. Stiffening her back, Raen pried herself off of the sky and fell back into the girl that was her, standing in a backyard.

            She kept her eyes closed and walked back into the house. The rain slicked against her already wet skin and dripped from the ends of her log curls. Raen was not the girl who was just out in the rain. That girl did not exist, and Raen needed to stop pretending that she did. It was a stupid thing to do, and there was not enough time in the day for it to be wasted on stupidity.