Rainism

It's raining, and I'm stuck inside a random building on campus.

Everything around me is quiet, exept for my typing and the hollow echo of raindrops outside.

The air is quite dim and muggy, and the building is quite monochrome, except for the window in front of me, dotted with colorful drops of water. Some are reflecting the gray sky, others the crimson wall paper, others the distorted contours of my face.

This morning, I looked out of the windows of my apartment and noticed the dreary haze outside. It might rain, I thought, but I folded that idea because carrying around an umbrella all day would be a hassle. Instead, I put on my hooded sweater, thinking that would suffice. As long as it isn't pouring outside, I thought. Well, it's pouring outside.

And so before stationing myself in front of this computer, I roamed around aimlessly from hallway to hallway, disappointed by the muddy floors and cramped cooridors. I was looking for something to pierce through the stuffiness, but everywhere I turned, all I could hear were the murmuring sounds of silence.

It made me think of my memories of rain. Some happy, some dramatic...mostly boring.

What comes to mind first, however, is that one night at Duke, when I walked back to my car in a dimly lit parking lot after spending nearly spent 10 straight hours in Perkins library.

I had mixed emotions of relief from finishing an assignment I had procrastinated on for weeks, and utter exhaustion from staring at the computer screen for the entire night.

The air was cold and fresh from April showers and occasional gusts of wind. I didn't have an umbrella, but I was wearing an extra large hoodie and sweatpants that kept dragging on the ground. Under it all were a pair of worn out flip flops that had lost so much of its traction that I couldn't stop myself from slipping at least four or five times in a 5 minute span. Each time I lost my balance, an unintentional "Whoa" would slip from my mouth. My voice was loud enough it echoed, and I would turn slightly red, even though nobody could see me.

The rain had been trickling down since I left the library, but as I got closer to the parking lot, it began pouring. Hard. I slipped my laptop underneath my sweater and looked up at the sky. All I saw were leaves, sparsely distribted across the gigantuous oak trees around me. And in between the leaves were little spots of sunshine, starting to glare through shamelessly into the naked air.

Then something strange happened. In that moment, all feeling stopped and I became numb. No pain. No joy. No frustration. No cold. Just nothingness...rest. Maybe this is what it feels like when you die, I thought.

I've tried to relive this experience every time it rains, but have never succeeded. The feeling escapes me, and the more I try to chase after it, the faster it seems to slip away from my fingers.

Maybe that's why I dislike rain so much. Because it teased me that once and refuses to share that magical feeling with me again. It taunts me and tells me I was only dreaming. But I wasn't, I couldn't have been. Because that day, I had been standing in the rain so long that my computer wouldn't work the next day. The diagnosis: resistor damage from shock.

Resistor damage from shock. Could that be the same thing that happened to me?