The Taste of Rain

She was alluring, white baggy t-shirt pressed against her skin by the warm summer rains that came so rarely to this desert. I call her Sara in my mind now, but I’m not sure that was her name then; it just seems to fit.

Her form was on display with aching clarity, still untouched by the freshman 15 that would catch her the following winter. An art major; smudges of paints from our evening in her art class dotted her shirt, hands, and gave her cheek a bright blue contrasting patch against the lascivious green of her eyes.

I’m not sure how we started touching one another, or even when the rains first came as we spent those precious hours slowly turning our own brand of tango through the grass and walkways beneath the blooming apple trees. Long curly hair draped her in chocolate black tresses, massaging her shoulders, back, and even our faces as we turned in the scent of the flowered night; Medusa’s coils tempting Perseus.

As our lips played velvet arias over the exposed skin of our dance partner the night passed into obscurity around us as no one else knew we existed. To everyone in the known world, this was just another drab evening wasted away in the depths of a chipped beer mug, with a tv remote and Scott Bakula for company; and for we two, it was eternity.

At long last, the warmth of the rain slipped away under the assault of the night and not even the fire burning inside us could stave off the chill indefinitely. We slipped back to her double bunked dorm room through the deepening mud puddles, shrugged off our soaked dance clothes and collapsed into bed in sweatpants and t-shirts pilfered from her roommate’s closet.

With our break from the fantasy world, she found new modesty and changed in the adjacent room. I would never learn how she looked under those clothes, but that didn’t matter. That night, Sara was everything, and through those soaking cotton threads, i saw all I had known of womanhood… And I learned to love the taste of rain.

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I’ve loved rain as long as I can remember, for this and a hundred other reasons. It’s a baptism; a lover’s arms.

Last night, the rain came to this dry city. It touched the ground like a two girls in the janitor’s closet: lightly, curious, and hardly in the right spots… and stopping long before anything was satisfying. It didn’t puddle anywhere, and the residual moisture in the air just pointed at the grey clouds as they were driven before the wind like dirty marshmallows spilling from a toddler’s grasp.

Brushing sleep and covers away I rolled through popcorn cobwebs, eventually tumbling into the bathroom to shower and dress for the workday ahead. Kissing my comatose Cinderella a blessing goodbye, I took special care to close the door softly and snuck through the house.

I wore my blue tie; electric blue licking my chest; a sickly azure tongue lolling out of a corpse black I wore head to toe. I was the well dressed cat burglar making his escape from a night of smash and grab, the scent of my plunder still ringing in my nose.

The door pulled away from the frame in my hand with the creak of old wood and the chime of the new alarm system. Three steps later it hit me. The sweat of the air. The rolling moisture of a long absent lover sliding her fingertips inside my sleeve and up my arm. That fluid riding the currents licking my face and neck, bathing behind my ears with her offering. The chemistry of the world had changed while I slept. It was intoxicating.

I stood in the center of the courtyard trying to fly, assuming anything was possible at that moment; arms straight down with palms pointed at the ground like I had rocket boosters. My nipples were hard and tingling. My eyes squeezed shut like Christmas morning,

Flight didn’t come. The world had changed, but I had not. I stood there breathing deep in through my nose, until my lungs were swimming; finally daring to rush to my car and drive to work before I abandoned it completely in favor of skinny dipping in the street.

Work slid past; oiled duty falling through the sluice of unrecoverable time. I was staring at my monitor, index finger buried to the second knuckle in my left nostril digging out the boredom when the phone on the desk lit an angry red and screeched for my attention.

I had to go, it said; a short drive and some hunting for a machine with no pronounceable name.

4635 Elwood. A painfully square fountain exists in the plaza there. Bored with it’s own existence it sits next to cast iron skeletal wolves; the lot of them surrounded by fat men and women, soaking up the grease from their doughnuts and sweating their office gossip onto one another in lieu of a purpose.

Between the buildings the breeze runs slightly stronger, pressed through the space, squirting from one end to the other. Across that dull unimaginative geometric body of water, it kissed me.

The spray from the jets hit the breeze like aerosol, tonguing my body again with life. The fountain brought it back; forgotten minutes in its clutches. I closed my eyes and reveled in it.

The taste of rain.

Reluctantly, I left the courtyard behind. I left the fountain, the water and the remembrance that no longer served me. Glass doors sealing off the memories, I let them all go… and went to work.