Rain

I love the rain, the tears of Sky Father--it is as archetypal to me as the sea, Primal Mother. Rain always brings me insights from my boyhood, when I spent long breaks at our ancestral house in San Fernando, Pampanga. It is the rain I associate most with my first experience and realization of homoeroticism.

In Pampanga, whenever it rained, our next-door neighbor, Rommel, a boy my age, and I would take off our shirts and run under the rain for as long as the rain lasted. We would run to places in the neighborhood we didn't ordinarily go to, as though the rain gave us the sole authority to do that. We would climb into a huge drum beneath a gutter spout and splash about. We would then shower together, naked. Nothing perverse happened--I am just mentioning the mental association that I have whenever it rains. As a matter of fact I have not seen Rommel for decades. He could be dead, living abroad, or an old man sitting at a computer also thinking about rain.

Those memories are distinct to me because, even at that age, I recall looking at the world around me and seeing how different it always was in the rain. The roads had puddles that were not there before, and the potholes turned into enchanted lagoons. I began noticing plants and weeds I hadn't in the dust and sunshine. Windows and wires were hung with droplets, like festive light bulbs on the eve of a mystical celebration. All of the adults were safely indoors, and I then felt that the universe was mine.

It is now raining in Cubao, and I am thinking of those days. I no longer yearn to go out and let Sky Father embrace me. The boy who used to play with Rommel is now an old writer whose name is Memory, and, no matter how much older I become, I will tell my readers stories about the rain.

It is raining, and the universe is still mine.