Here comes the rain (Buddie) - English

Chapter 15 : Panic Room

The departure of guests always leaves a feeling of emptiness. Suddenly the walls echo. The space, cramped in their presence, becomes strangely vast. And despite a certain relief, there is also sometimes a feeling of suffocation - like a fog blanket descending, rendering everything tasteless.The Baining, a community living in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, know this experience so well that they have given it a name: awumbuk. According to them, guests leave a kind of heaviness behind them in order to travel smoothly. This oppressive mist hangs around for three days after their departure: it generates distraction and inertia, preventing the family from taking care of the house and crops. That is why the Baining, once their guests have left, pour water into a bowl and let it absorb the impure air all night long.The next day, the family wakes up at dawn and throws the water into the trees, after which ordinary life can resume.

It is up to you to learn how to purify this air from the presence of those who have left but have left behind a presence far too heavy for you to move forward.

To you, whose presence has taken up far too much space, in our lives and yours, to the point of forgetting how to live and who must now go away.

Part Two

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The Storm

Two weeks later...

There are several types of emergencies.

There are the first emergencies, those of daily life, that we all go through and that stir our hearts, sometimes too fragile to bear it. Family emergencies, when we are caught in a quarrel between two people who love each other too much to love each other properly or who no longer love each other enough to say it. Caught between two fires, unable to take sides because we love these people with far too much passion to break one of them. Or because we are tired of fighting in wars that are not our own.

Illness, accidents, fear, and mistakes create the primary causes of emergencies. A mother afflicted with Alzheimer's living with her single and young daughter, a child whose thoughts are so clouded by the words of classmates that their choice turns to a weapon or a razor blade, a father who does not love enough, or who does not know how to love and pours out his sadness and anger on the faces of his children, or a young girl who feels so bad in her body and mind that what keeps her on this earth is a person who will never love her.

These emergencies are not the ones that prompt fire trucks or ambulances to move. Often, it is the armed forces that move, because either it is too late to act, or the root cause needs to be treated.

And then there are the real emergencies. Those that come into the 911 call center and can move mountains.

"911, what's your emergency?"

"Hello. I'm not sure if you're the right one to call for this kind of thing, but... I think something's happening across the street. You should send the police before it escalates.

- Ma'am, can you tell me what happened?

- Absolutely not, I'm not stepping out of my house. I'm watching TV, you know, I know what a gunshot does, I've seen it in the police series I watch, The Rookie, I think.

- Did you hear a gunshot?

- Not just one, there were three to be exact, but everyone ran away so there's no one on the street anymore. But there are still those people's cars that went into the building just across a while ago, I'm pretty sure that's where the gunshots came from.

- Did you see anyone?

- No, but I know there's some sort of support group on the ground floor, and you know what they say about soldiers traumatized by war? They all end up snapping, and it's best not to be around when it happens."