D. R. Wormack
[Author's Note: This personal essay was written as an exercise emulating an essayette (called such by the original author) in the style of Ross Gay from "The Book of Delights". ]
I was returning from the gym, from maintaining the physical body through sweat—a sort of human rain, like tears—which coated me from head to toe, dripping the colors down my face and neck from the hair I dyed a few days before.
It was raining when I arrived but less so as I left the too warm, too dark hall of the gym, or weight room—or wait room as every body in there does the hidden work inside their cocoon waiting for a sweat, human rain, induced metamorphosis.
To stop the colors’ bleeding, I thought to put my hood up, even though I hate the rustling, crinkling noises that encase my ears in that particular jacket. Then, I remembered (maybe not remembered but reclaimed, reminded, or rebelled into being) that I love the rain.
It is my favorite weather. “What? But it’s cold and makes you damp and sticks with you and is an unavoidable inconvenience and is uncomfortable.” That’s what people always say when I say I love the rain. The first reaction to non-picturesque, unaesthetic love.
And I agree with them. I tell them, “Sure it is, it does, it can be, it was.” I don’t love the rain because it is all good. I love it because it is water from the sky, a drought’s end, a flood’s beginning, someone’s tears, someone else’s first kiss. It is life giving and taking, hydration and drowning. It is soothing and discomforting. Its sound is rhythmic, the steady drumbeat of the earth. Its feeling chaotic as any number, any size, any temperature drops hit any color, any story skin. Its smell is unique, a dankness of soil and concrete. Have you ever smelled the wet leaves of a tree or the wet window of a car? Its taste can be off-putting (depending on where the tongue is, perhaps under the smog filled skies of Pittsburgh or the subtle tree filled valleys of the Youghiogheny River trail), but it made the pilgrimage of its life down thousands of [insert preferred measurement unit here] to one waiting tongue.
And the sight. If you could look skyward and see the song of a chorus or the feeling of being high, you could see the rain, a whole cloud fallen from the sky or a single drop of water descending like an angel from heaven.
I love the rain because it is never one thing. The rain itself is a contradiction touching both earth and sky but never truly belonging to one or the other, never bound to one identity—maybe I have a bias toward things that blend the stark like races, religions, cultures, and sexualities.
So, I put my hood back down, left my jacket unzipped, removed my hands from my pockets, and smiled as rain mingled and molded and mated with sweat and hair dye and dry lips and long lashes and split skin. I felt the rain because I love it, and partially out of spite.
On some media platform, that has already claimed too many hours of my life, embedded on the phone embedded in my hand, I read a quote that might have been from Shakespeare but was definitely from one or another long dead or long forgotten writer. To paraphrase (unless my memory has subconsciously engrained it verbatim), “You say you love the rain, yet you walk under an umbrella when it pours.” No, I don’t think using an umbrella means you have deserted your love for precipitation. Sometimes we must watch our lovers from a distance to greater appreciate them, like art. But, since I read that quote, I realized I must be open with love, with how I connect to it, how I define it. Love is not admiration, I realized, but interaction.
I cannot deny the rain just because it is inconvenient for me and my destination and my clothes and my rigid human schedule. Because, because, because. Because the rain is inconvenient only for a little while. If I love the rain, sometimes I have to let it come to me unhindered, unbridled, unhidden, unlying. I walked home, in the rain, out of love—and out of spite of hiding my love—with my hands stretched out, my face drinking in the sky, eyes blinded by a waterfall, lips smiling despite the cars and strangers passing by watching me kiss my love. And to love something complicated and exhausting and changing every day, to love something like that when being told by the world not to love it, being told the definition of love is only bright and kind and of one form, to love in that cloudy, wet, thunderous, flooding, uncomfortable way is a delight.
Maybe I’ll get sick from being hot and sweaty then cold and drenched but what an honor to get sick out of love and delight. But maybe I’ll stay smiling, in sickness and in health, with open arms waiting for love to rain over me.
2023
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