Rain, rain, go away
The monsoon season arrived in the desert a week ago, and already the complaining about the teasing nights where it seems certain it will rain, but doesn’t, has begun. It’s the local summer sport, speculating and griping about weather by a population who desperately wants rain, and it only happens during monsoon, because there’s not much speculating to be done the other 10 months of the year, where the forecast is “Sunny yesterday. Sunny today. Sunny tomorrow. Sunny next week.”
Unquestionably, we need the rain, particularly because the lightning and wind come anyway; if it isn’t followed closely by rain, fires are wont to start and burn out of control as the winds whip them up and send them forth to feed on desiccated scrub. The rain makes the trees happy. But personally, I don’t think I’ll mind too much if we get less rain this year.
Because as the humidity has risen, my mood has sunk. Part of that was that it’s July, and I know what’s coming: the 1 year milestone of living without him. (How is it possible?) But it was more than that, and it took me a couple sweaty days to figure it out. The body has its own memories, recognizing triggers that the mind might miss, and the monsoon was in full swing when he died. It rained every day last year, more rain than I’d seen in a monsoon season since I moved here 8 years before, and I couldn’t help but feel that the skies were crying with me, that the heavens knew my loss. So when the season started this year and I felt the clamminess of humidity on my skin, all those memories and moods rushed back.
I tend to be afflicted with S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder), and after 3 days of rain at any time of year, I start feeling depressed. Considering that I had been flayed and gutted alive, emotionally anyway, I hardly needed anything else that was depression-inducing last summer And yet the skies emptied every day until the washes threatened to overrun their banks, as my tears overran my eyes with a constancy that astonished me, and still does. I didn’t know a person could cry that much. And what’s more, I’m not done crying about this; perhaps I never will be. My favorite grandmother died 22 years ago, and thinking about her can still bring me to tears. Oddly enough, that comforts me; I know I am in no danger of ever forgetting him.
Every morning after he died, I would wake up (because I could actually sleep, the only blessed release bestowed by the exhaustion of grief and pain) and my very first thought when I awoke was “He’s gone. Oh my god, he’s gone.” Every day I had this rude awakening, like a heavy boot in my chest. It was like getting the news fresh each day, with all the attendant shock and horror, only I was giving myself the news. Denial is an imperfect mechanism, because as much as you deny reality, there is always one part of your mind that is sadistically happy to remind you of the truth, and it never gives you a break. Maybe it’s not sadistic; maybe, in truth, it is the part that is holding on to your precarious sanity by its very fingernails, trying to hold on until you come back from the brink.
I would wake up with this realization again and again, and would feel a leaden weight upon me as I went through the motions of showering, dressing, and swigging the Pepto that served as breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the first two weeks, food being nothing I was interested in, and a constantly upset stomach making any attempt at eating for eating’s sake unappealing in and of itself. But by the time I had done those things, I’d worn myself out, and, with nothing practical to busy my mind with until I had to drag myself to work, I would return to the thought that I woke with: He’s gone. And soon I would curl up in a ball on the bed and cry and cry until the tears were replaced with a sniffling numbness and I knew, for the first time in my life, what it truly meant to feel empty inside. I would stare into space until I’d gathered the strength to stand up again, splash my face, and head to work, where I would follow much the same routine, escaping to the bathroom, becoming an expert at sobbing violently, yet silently, until I could escape again.
And then I would have to go out into the rain, previously a source of excitement, now a straw this grieving camel could hardly bear. I remember driving to the dentist for a cleaning the day before I had been scheduled to leave to go visit him at the end of July. That visit never happened. And the rain was just too much, and I cried all the way there, pulling myself together in the parking lot before I walked in. I tried to keep the tears out of my eyes, lest I have to explain them to the hygienist. And then I cried all the way to work.
The monsoon is beautiful, and I have taken many, many pictures of evening rainbows and gorgeous sunsets, and clouds that will take your breath away. I had taken a bunch like that on July 13th, and he got around to looking at them on the 14th. When I got home from work that night, I found an e-mail from him saying “Those are gorgeous pictures.” Those were the last words I ever had from him.
So, no, I will not mind if the rain is scarce this year. I am flooded with memories and tears as it is; more rain might very well drown me.