Rain falls as it does,

A gentle fury.

Notice how it does not miss a single windowsill,

How it is at once regular and the opposite,

And how it all somehow fits

Just behind the echoes of his laughter.

This exact feeling can never quite

Be replicated, ever again. The sound the rain

Is making just now. Those exact crinkles

That your arm, heavy with sleep,

Is making in these warm sheets.

The lantern light, flickering, yellow,

Withering and blooming,

Dancing to this perfect silence.

This moment just now is a bridge

Between everything that has happened,

Didn’t happen, ought to have happened.

And everything that might be,

Will soon be, will never be.

 

Time goes on as it does,

A wrathful softness.

And as I watch you watching the pitter-patter of life just outside,

I wonder if you will remember this rainy evening,

And every other evening like this that has

Left us a little less broken,

I wonder if you will remember it all in the same way that I will:

Those pizza boxes sprawled across the floor and

That laughter in our lungs and

The refrigerator’s eerie glow illuminating

The dark crevices beneath our eyes. Nights like these

show, time and time again,

Just how delicate life and its little raindrops

Can be. Those windows that fogged up immediately

As we breathed onto them, eyes agleam with wonder and

Fascination (even though it was just another rainy day).

Those four glass panes were the only things

Keeping that rain out

And life’s little drops just continued to fall,

exactly as they did.

---

Sadia Ahmed, 2019