He stood out in the rain

He stood out in the rain, his head tilted backwards, feeling the cold kisses caress his skin as the curtains of rain soaked him till the point of a chill.The rain was heavy but soft; it was cold, but comforting, fresh but fouled. It was the rain of decades of years all locked up and waiting to be remembered, waiting to be acknowledged once again.

He could feel every droplet touch him, each leaving an imprint, each with a memory of its own. Every touch felt like a heavy pressure with the weight of a secret that has been locked away for years. Every droplet released a food of expression and reminded him of what he forgot and chose not to share. A replay of a past he had tried to forget.

The man’s eyes were closed, but his ears were open to the sounds that were so alien yet so deeply embedded into his mind, that they sounded familiar. The sound was so clear, as though he could hear every drop hit the ground; hear it vibrate through his body like a shockwave, making his mind race with images they contained. The sound was deafening even to his already near-deaf ears.

The smell of the atmosphere filled him, running through his senses like wildfire. He could smell the moisture as his mind replicated these for the past. Memories. The thick humidity drenched him with not only water, but a deeper thought, something that cut into his senses more than a simple drop of water could. Locked away, its hidden metaphor; a reality that he substituted for rain.

He opened his mouth, the water filling up his cheeks as he let it run down his chin and join the rest of the water as it soaked his clothes. A sweet refreshing taste of clean water warped his clear headedness and it was the final straw of sanity. A vivid slideshow of the past printed itself from behind his closed eyelids. Tears trickled down his cheeks and mixed in with the rain. The water represented to him, a year of torment, a year of hardship and a year of rain and death. The shower of rain was transformed into a shower of bullets that cascaded down upon them from the dense twilight from unseen enemies. The loud crash of thunder represented the deafening explosions of grenades. The lightning struck all around him, like fingers reaching out to grab at him, to take whatever was left of his sight that a landmine had taken from him with its burning lights that fried his retinas. The hard downpour filled his cupped hands as he sipped the contents, it tasted as sweet as it had when he first came home, but as stained with hardship, as it had when he first got there.

All these memories swirled around him and crashed home as hard as the rain did. He could remember the time where even the fresh smell that rain brings, brought a knot to his stomach. He could remember everyday that it rained, and the few that it didn’t. The times where it was as close to heaven that life could have been were the days when they could see the sky.He hated rain, he hated water. But with each droplet, the anger melted away till he was just left with his thoughts, and the fading sounds of the ending rain.

“Papa? What are you doing out here? You’ll catch a cold!” A girl of twenty placed her hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“I was just remembering Kakoda…”