My love, it is raining again.

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੭﹕﹒ I used to think rain was an inconvenience.

An unfortunate interruption to an otherwise perfectly reasonable day; a gray smudge against the windshield, a nuisance, a reason to complain about California as though the state had PERSONALLY betrayed me. Here, well, rain is an infrequent thing. A rather annoying visitor that NOT ONLY arrives unexpectedly, but ALSO overstays its welcome, leaving the world smelling faintly of wet pavement and eucalyptus.

And yet, somehow, it always finds me when I am going to you---I don't know when I first noticed it, perhaps I was too preoccupied with the miles between us, with the restless arithmetic of distance, with watching the numbers on the navigation screen diminish one by one until the hours separating us could finally be counted on my fingers. Perhaps I was too busy imagining your face to pay attention to the sky. But there has **always** been rain somehow someway.

A little at first, perhaps. A scatter of droplets against the windshield, silver threads catching the headlights, the occasional darkening of the asphalt. Then enough to turn the road into a ribbon of reflected light, enough to make the world beyond my windows blur at the edges; until everything became water and headlights and the small, stubborn fact that I was getting closer to you. It was funny, really. California could go weeks without even recalling what rain was, and yet the exact MOMENT I decided to cross the distance between us, the sky seemed to remember it all at once. As if it had to be somewhere to be Aswell.(¬`‸´¬)

The first time I had met you in person it was not merely raining, but there was a WHOLE full-fledged 'go home instanteously' kind of storm. (haha 'the storm' BJKSBK/ref) One that made our phones light up with urgent little warnings, messages instructing us to stay home, to avoid the roads, to reconsider the very sensible decision to travel at all. There were multiple notifications, if I remember correctly. The sort of thing a reasonable person might interpret as a sign to postpone their plans... BUT we went anyway. I think there's something rather ridiculous about that as well, in retrospect. Two people who had spent so long wanting to be in the same place, finally given the opportunity, and the weather had the AUDACITY to object. And what were we supposed to do with that? Turn around? Accept that we were to remain on the opposite sides of a distance we had already spent years trying to overcome?

Absolutely NOT. 

Hence, I arrived feeling like a sopping wet cat. I cannot think of a more dignified way to put it. I was practically waterlogged, probably a little disheveled, and very much aware that i had subjected myself to an absurd amount of meteorological abuse to stand in front of you. The storm had made quite a spectacle of itself. I imagine that I must have looked as I had narrowly escaped being fished out of a lake. BUT. I STILLL made it. And then there you were, no longer a voice on the other end of a call, but you were there, in the same place, breathing the same literal air AND occupying the impossibly ordinary moment as me.

For all the rain that had fallen between us, there you were. 

I think I could've stood in that storm forever if it meant seeing you once again. 

Perhaps that is where that thought began: My understanding soon became that loving you would sometimes (more so OFTENTIMES) mean being/looking a little ridiculous. That if there was even the smallest opening in our schedules, the briefest opportunity to see another, we would reach for it with both hands. We would rearrange things, count hours. I would plant routes, negotiate with the distance. We would find a way to make the improbable fit inside an afternoon, an evening, even a few precious hours together. Even if the sky had decided to be UNKIND (rude. >:T) 

I suppose the rain became a part of that promise without me meaning for it too. It followed me though out that year, tapping its impatient little fingers against the glass. It occupied the anticipation, the nervousness, the familiar ache of knowing that every mile I drove toward you was a mile I had to drive away from you again. 

Now, it happens before I can help it. A soft patter against the car window, a subtle darkening of the road, the rhythmic sweep of the windshield wipers, and there you are. Not physically unfortunately, of course not. But I see you anyway. I watch the droplets gather along the glass, each one catching the gray daylight, hesitating for a moment before gravity makes the decision for it. Then they begin to race. They merge, split apart, overtake one another, leave thin, trembling trails behind them. Sometimes I choose a favorite and follow it with my eyes, arbitrarily deciding that this one will win, that this ONE will make it all the way up to the bottom before the others catch up. And I think of the miles. I think of all the roads that have carried me to you, of all the times the weather has made itself known and I have found myself smiling despite it. How strange it is that something so ordinary has become so intimately yours. How a sound I once barely noticed can now reach into the middle of an otherwise unremarkable day and leaving me missing you so fiercely I have to literally sit with the feeling for a moment.

The rain does not know you, however. It does not know your laugh, or the particular shape of your smile, or all the small things about you I have learned to love. it does not know how long I waited to meet you, how many ordinary evenings were spent together from opposite ends of a distance, how extraordinary it felt to finally stand beside you and discover the person I had loved for so long was real in all the ways i had imagined and in so many more I could never have anticipated. 

It knows nothing about us. 

And yet I cannot hear it without thinking of you. 

Perhaps that is what love does. Perhaps it takes the most unremarkable things in the world and makes them impossible to encounter innocently ever again. A song becomes yours because we listened to it together. A place becomes yours because you stood there beside me. A particular hour of the evening becomes yours because that was when you would call. And the rain becomes yours because, for reasons I cannot explain, it kept meeting me on the way to you. 

Even on our anniversary when I was making that nine-hour trek to see you, it rained again. Of course it did. When I had planned a picnic. An actual picnic, with the sort of optimism that should probably have been accompanied by a signed disclaimer acknowledging my complete lack of authority over the weather. And there I was, driving toward you beneath a sky that seemed determined to test the structural integrity of my plans, wondering whether I had somehow managed to arrange a romantic anniversary outing with the SINGULAR condition most capable of ruining it. I recall being worried, wondering whether we would have to change everything, the day I had been looking forward to would become another memory of rain-soaked clothes and me improvising solutions. I remember thinking that it would be just my luck for the weather to interrupt us yet again.

And somehow, it stopped. The rain passed. The picnic was no longer quite the foolish undertaking I had feared it would be. I don't know what to make of that, even now. But I don't think I need to make anything of it. I was going to see you with all those hours with you waiting at the end of them, the rain had accompanied me for part of the journey, and then, for once, it let me have my day.

I wonder whether I have become superstitious about it. Whether I have begun to look for meaning in something that has none, to gather coincidence after coincidence until they resemble a pattern, until the pattern resembles a promise. The rain does not have to mean anything, after all. It can simply be rain and still I can still find you in it. I can find you in the sound of water against a window on a day when I cannot find my way to you at all.

Today, it rained again. 

I heard it before I really noticed it, the familiar little patter against the world, and suddenly I wanted you beside me so badly that the feeling seemed to occupy the entire space where you ought to have been. I wanted the miles to disappear. I wanted another drive, another reunion, another ridiculous encounter with the weather. I wanted the luxury of being able to look at you instead of imagining you, but all I could do was listen to the rain and watch the droplets gather and race down the glass and think of you as I always do. I thought of how many times the sky has accompanied me to you, and how strange it is that the very same sound can know make me feel both as though I am on my way to you and as though I have never been farther away. 

I miss you. The rain keeps falling and I miss you. There is something so cruel about it, how a thing that has so often accompanied my happiness can be the very thing that reminds me of your absence. How the sound that once meant I was getting closer can now make me ache for a distance I cannot close today. 

But perhaps I am being unfair to the rain.

     It has never promised to bring you to me. It has only ever fallen. I am the one who learned to associate it with you.

I am the one who began to recognize you in the sound of water against glass, who began to see our history in the gray sky over the highway, who began to understand that some memories are not confined to the places where they happened. They follow you. They settle you into ordinary things. They wait patiently for the world to remind you of them. And, if I am lucky, it will become part of the story of how I keep getting to you, too. There will be other drives. Other rainy afternoons. other occasions where the sky opens above a road I have already traveled a hundred times, and I find myself smiling at the windshield without having to think about it, who I am reminded of. 

There will be days when I hear that familiar patter and wish you were beside me. Days where the miles feel impossibly long. Days when the rain is only rain, and missing you is only missing you, and there is nothing to do but let the feeling pass through me. And there will be days when the sky clears. When the road dries. When the clouds full apart, and I finally arrive, and you are there, and the whole ridiculous world seems to have quieted itself just long enough for me to hold you again. 

Until then, I think I will keep watching the droplets race down my window. Even now when I cannot make that journey, when all I have is the sound of it against the glass and the memory of your face waiting at the end of a long drive, some part of me still feels as though I am on my way. Perhaps that is what I have come to love about it. The rain reminds me that I have been there before, that I have already found you. That, despite the weather, despite the miles, despite all the little ways a world can make loving someone "inconvenient," I have so often had the privilege of arriving. 

And oh, how I have loved arriving.

So let it rain.

Let it tap against the windows and silver the roads. Let it gather on the windshield, let it race down the glass, let it turn the world gray and familiar and full of memories I can no longer separate from you. I will think of you every time. I will miss you every time. And when the opportunity comes, when the road opens before me and I have somewhere to go (and someone to go see <3 ) I will gather my things and make my way toward you again.

Even if it rains. ESPECIALLY if it does.

Because, my love, no matter how far away you are, some part of me is always on its way to you. 

And if the sky must open every single time I come looking for you, then let it. Let it rain over every highway, every mile, and every road that separates us. Let it soak through my clothes and blur the world beyond the windshield. Let it turn me into that ridiculous sopping wet cat I was the first time I finally stood beside you. I would still find a way. Through the storm, through the silence, through every long and lonely stretch of road, because I know what waits for me at the end of it. I know your face, I know your arms, I know the feeling of finally being where I have wanted to be all along. 

Until then, I think I will always be a little homesick when it rains. I will wish that the distance was something we could laugh about from opposite ends of a couch rather than something I have to measure in hours across a navigation screen. I will wish I could stop counting down the days until I see you and start taking for granted the simple miracle of having you within reach. Always, with some part of me, no matter where I am, always wishing I was already there.