After Rain
The rain belonged to no one. This was the first thing Sophie learned in her entire life.
She had only been two years old at the time, when circumstance marked her memory with an unforgettable encounter with rain. Even at that young age, she was able to remember the details of her experience, for as far as babies’ memories go, Sophie’s were a lot clearer than most. And it was her memory of the night of November 2, 1995 that would remain etched in her mind for the next eighteen years.
It had been dusk when Typhoon Rosing first swept over Barangay San Isidro Labrador, flooding its tiny streets and causing panic among its residents. Shouting instructions to each other, families moved their cars to higher ground, beggars scurried to the nearest barangay hall for shelter, and street children rejoiced as they swam across the dark, swirling waters that now flooded the road. Amidst this flurry of activity that spanned the narrow length of Iba Street, no one noticed a uniformed housemaid struggling to close the balcony doors of a tall white house near the corner of Iba and Simoun. Drenched and dripping, almost swaying with the force of the wind, this lone house stood at the far edge of an isolated blackout, its high walls echoing the high-pitched shrieks of a frightened baby.
Her face and hair wet from the rain, the maid in the balcony gripped the sides of a glass door with both hands while attempting to shield the baby stroller beside her from the lashing rain. Positioning her body against the direction of the howling wind, she managed to close the door in one swift movement, but before she could push the other one into place, it swung wildly from a sudden gust of wind and slammed against her with enough force to knock her onto the floor. Just before she passed out from shock and exhaustion, she pulled the stroller aside and attempted to calm the terrified baby inside it with reassuring whispers that could barely be heard above the roar of the wind. Then, against her will, she faded from consciousness, and the child was left alone.
The rest of the day was a nightmare for Sophie. As dusk withered away and darkness slowly crept over the horizon, the periodic flashes of gray lightning became more and more frequent, until her ears were constantly ringing with anticipation, until she could no longer tell noise from silence, darkness from light.
By the time the maid beside her awoke, the baby had ceased crying. Her skin matted with dried tears and rain, she twirled a stray leaf in her hands and continued to stare mutely at the storm outside. Relieved that the child was safe and calm, the maid was about to reach for her when she noticed the strange expression on her face. Following Sophie’s gaze, she looked past the glass doors and saw familiar trees swaying wildly in the wind as the rain outside continued to fall in cold sheets, beating down heavily on roads and rooftops, unrelenting in its fury. Without taking her eyes off the storm, she reached a shaking hand to the baby and gripped her tiny fist tightly. Together, they watched the deluge with a strange stillness, disturbed only by the distant rumble of thunder, the constant pattering of rain on rooftops.
The downpour had still not ceased by the time Sophie’s parents returned home, delayed by four hours of unmoving traffic. Her father had immediately rushed to her side and carried her in his arms, promising that the rain would soon stop and that wind would die down again. Overcome with guilt, her mother had tried to make her go to sleep by singing lullabies to her and rocking her in a cradle, hoping that her daughter would quickly forget the trauma she had experienced.
But Sophie could not rest for a single moment. Despite her father’s promises, the storm still continued to rage outside their house, growing even stronger as the hours passed into midnight, as if determined to prove him wrong. As she lay in her cradle in the dim light of her parents’ room, she looked past the billowing curtains and took in the dark clouds, the incessant rain, the sudden flashes of lightning, and found herself unable to turn away.
In the years that followed, Sophie’s memory of this night would undergo various changes, mostly drawing from her nanny’s exaggerated retellings throughout her childhood. Being the only child in the family, she had the full attention of their housemaid, with whom she spent most of her toddler years. During lazy afternoons, as she ironed and folded clothes in the room they shared, she told Sophie stories of her own eventful childhood, sprinkling them with such fantastic characters as dwarves, fairies, and mermaids. Not surprisingly, the child soon developed a fascination for such tales, and continued to envision them in her mind long after her nanny returned to her province in Leyte. Over the years, she came to invent a lot of adventures for herself, but the one memory that always remained with her was her first encounter with rain. She remembered staring anxiously past the window and into the tempest outside—a single image that would replay itself again and again in her mind in the years to come. No one, she finally came to believe, had any control over the rain.
Which was why she was extremely surprised when it began following her. Six years after her first encounter with rain, she realized it would be a part of her life forever.
At first she thought it was a mistake. She had been at school, eating a cupcake quietly at her desk during recess, when the first drop of water fell on her head. Instinctively, eight-year-old Sophie glanced up at the ceiling, expecting to find a hole or crack of some sort, and was surprised to find nothing but peeling plaster. Puzzled, she reached a hand up to her head just as another drop fell seemingly out of thin air. This time, she caught it with the back of her hand, but as she moved to wipe it on her sleeve, she found no evidence of water on her skin—it was as dry as ever.
Unsure of what to do, she left her cupcake half-uneaten on her desk and exited the classroom, looking around carefully to see if anyone was pulling a prank on her. But no one was paying her even the slightest attention. As she headed for the restroom, she spotted a group of her classmates huddled near the bottom of the staircase, playing marbles. One of them gestured for her to join the game, but the thought of her being surrounded by so many people was enough to send her into a panic. She quickly glanced away, pretending not to have noticed them.
As she rounded an empty corridor, Sophie grew increasingly suspicious of her surroundings and quickened her pace, all the while feeling nonexistent drops of rainwater falling gently, playfully, on her skin. She had just begun doubting herself when the rain began to fall harder. As if in response to the fear and panic rising inside her, drop after drop of unfamiliar rain fell insistently on her arms, shoulders, and head, until her skin began to feel cold and clammy, until her ears were ringing with the patter of rain, but still reality refused to reflect what she was sensing all too vividly.
Utterly bewildered, she stumbled into the restroom and gazed at herself in the mirror. And it was then that she truly saw herself—her reflection standing in the rain, drenched and dripping, her clothes darkened by the downpour, her hair stubbornly sticking to the sides of her face. She could not believe it. She blinked once, twice, before shutting her eyes and locking herself inside an empty stall, where she began to sob uncontrollably.
Her first instinct was to ignore it. She thought that if she did, the rain would eventually leave her alone. But it did not, nor did it reveal its intentions to her. Impossibly, the rain continued to follow her, sometimes resigning itself to a soft drizzle, sometimes building up a deluge, and at other times merely a haze, a cold mist that clung to her skin. Naturally, she told no one. At first, she kept it a secret for fear of being perceived as strange, or worse, different. But as she grew older, Sophie learned to view this peculiarity not as a curse but as a unique gift. She prided herself in knowing that nobody else could experience what she felt on a daily basis, and that no one would ever know.
Eventually, she grew accustomed to the rain. At some point, she even began to appreciate it, for it kept her company in the direst situations, comforting her with reassuring drops and listening to her occasional monologues. Sometimes she imagined the rain would reply to her, imagined only it could understand her. During these times, she often asked the rain why it had decided to follow her, out of so many others, but the rain always remained silent when faced with this question, giving her only a few halfhearted drops in reply.
Once, as Sophie was walking to the school parking lot, the rain changed things for her. It had begun to actually drizzle, the first time since the rain started following her. She stiffened at the sight of real raindrops falling in front of her, around her. The sensation of water on her skin felt no different than usual, and yet at the same time she felt strangely distressed. She knew something was amiss, but she couldn’t tell exactly what. She stopped and waited under the overhanging eaves of a store for several minutes. Something was bound to happen, she could tell.
Just then, the school bell rang for the third time that afternoon, signaling the dismissal for high school students. As if right on cue, an excited throng of uniformed adolescents crowded against the school gates, not at all minding the slight rain. From where she was standing, Sophie could see the lot of them being drenched by the drizzle. She saw a group of boys running towards the open basketball courts. She followed their movements with her eyes as they scattered all over the pavement. She watched the rain soak their undershirts and slide off their skin in small transparent drops. She heard the splash of their feet on puddles, the windy echoes of their excited shouting. She resented the sight of their black hair glistening in the rain. Feeling something tighten inside her chest, she turned to walk stiffly back to the parking lot, ignoring the soft pattering behind her.
Despite everything, Sophie still chose to believe that she was special, that she had somehow been set apart from all the other thirteen-year-old girls in the world. She dreamed her way through high school and distanced herself from her peers. She grew accustomed to tying her hair up in a ponytail and wearing black-rimmed glasses, which she had a habit of pushing up her button nose. Her mother repeatedly told her that bulky glasses did not suit her small face, but she stubbornly refused to listen to her advice. Carrying this look well into her college years, she prided herself with the idea that she was a truly special girl, personally chosen by the rain at eight years of age.
But Sophie’s image of herself was shattered during her last year as a college student. On that day, everything changed. She had been sitting on her usual seat in the library, trying to write her own yearbook write-up, when life came to an unexpected halt. She had been looking back on her nineteen years of life, trying to come up with a first sentence to describe herself, when the rain stopped falling.
Having been used to its constant presence for the past eleven years, Sophie started at its sudden absence. She could only blink in surprise. Even the cold mist that usually surrounded her had gone. Tapping her pen against the table in agitation, she waited for the rain to return. When it did not, a cold, unfamiliar feeling swept across her upper back, and she gritted her teeth in frustration. She felt exposed, naked without the rain, and she could not stand it. Hurriedly gathering her belongings, she rushed out of the library and stepped into the harsh sunlight of early August. She immediately recoiled at the sudden sensation of heat on her bare skin, but took only a moment to steel herself before plunging into the afternoon brightness.
As she made her way past the open tennis courts and into the gymnasium, she kept track of the people passing by from a corner of her eye, and cringed inwardly whenever someone so much as cast a glance at her. She felt a gnawing sense of vulnerability, of blatant, unwanted exposure, and kept her head bent down in an attempt to hide herself. Elbowing her way through the line of girls waiting outside the shower rooms, she quickly entered an empty stall, and—without bothering to take off her clothes—stood under a cold shower.
Sophie welcomed the feel of water on her warm skin. Drenching herself thoroughly, she relished the coldness that enveloped her body as she slowly peeled off her clothes and let the water run over her naked skin. Filling her mouth with its metallic, rusty taste, she untied her ponytail and ran a hand through her damp hair, letting the water seep through to its very roots. Sighing inaudibly, she closed her eyes in bliss as she stood unmoving and let the cold water wash over her, let it consume her entirely.
A loud knock on the door thirty minutes later brought her back to reality. A sharp woman’s voice demanded that she come out of the stall and let the other girls have a turn at the shower. Against her will, Sophie shut off the water and began putting her wet clothes back on, vainly attempting to dry her hair with a thin handkerchief. She emerged from the stall a few moments later, ignoring the many stares that greeted her as she passed through the back exit and walked to the school gates.
It was past dusk when she finally arrived home. Waving away her mother’s greetings, she dropped her school bag and headed straight for the bathroom. Undisturbed, she took her time removing her damp clothes before she stepped under the shower, again savoring the sensation of falling water on her moist skin. Several minutes later, her body sore from standing, she filled a tub with lukewarm water and submerged herself under its clear surface. She remained in that position for the next hour, not even bothering to heat the water when it grew cold from the night air; it didn’t matter that she was sneezing repeatedly, that her fingers and toes were becoming shriveled.
Sophie was just about to drift off to sleep when she was startled by her mother’s voice, calling her for dinner. She clenched her teeth in annoyance before reluctantly standing up and drying herself with a towel. She would have preferred to stay in the bathroom all night, but she did not want to risk her mother’s suspicion. Against her will, she quickly pulled a loose nightgown over her head and waited for the tub to finish draining.
Her father was still at the table when she emerged from her room. Seeing that her mother had already finished eating, she sat down on her accustomed seat and glanced at his plate in an attempt to work up an appetite. It was the worst thing she could have done. Hunched over the table beside her, he had scooped a bit of everything onto his plate without reservation. A heaping of pasta lay on top of soupy rice, and pieces of meat filled up one corner of his plate. Broken strings of noodles lay scattered around his placemat and soup bowl, which lay in a small puddle of spilled water. She looked away in disgust.
As usual, neither of them spoke, and they would have eaten together in silence had it not been for her father’s noisy slurps and the scraping of his silverware against a porcelain plate. Sophie began eating only after her father left the table. Normally a relatively fast eater, she found herself without any appetite and only forced herself to finish the food she had already scooped onto her plate. She did not like leaving things undone.
When she finished eating and washing her share of the dishes more than an hour later, she returned to her room and lay quietly on the bed. Her eyelids heavy with fatigue, she felt her body aching for rest, but could not find it in her to fall asleep. Clasping her hands beneath her head, her hair fanned out on a pillow, Sophie looked up at the ceiling and waited. Despite everything, she still retained some hope that the rain would return, thinking that perhaps it had only been testing her, to see how she would react to its sudden disappearance. In her mind, she repeatedly called out to the rain, hoping that it would listen and come back. She strained her ears for an echo, a ghost of a reply, but she heard nothing except the faint, muffled sounds of television coming from her parents’ bedroom.
Midnight arrived, and still Sophie remained in that position, her mouth set in a frown. She struggled to focus on a single point in the air, from which she expected a raindrop to materialize at any moment. She tried her best not to blink or move, hoping that sheer effort might somehow prompt the rain’s return. Several minutes later, when the truth finally dawned upon her, she could not prevent her eyes from filling up with tears, and she would have finally let them fall had it not been for the sudden downpour of rain.
Sophie could not believe it. Without even bothering to put on her slippers, she hurriedly tumbled out of bed and ran into their open balcony, the rush of rain echoing in her ears. As the first drops fell on her neck and shoulders, she closed her eyes and spun around with her arms spread wide in gratitude, unable to contain her happiness. She didn’t care that she was standing under the rain only in her nightgown, or that some of their neighbors might see her. She didn’t care at all, for in her mind, there was only her and the rain.
For hours, she stood under the heavy downpour, celebrating the rain’s return and relishing every moment of it. When her legs tired of standing, she sat down on the tiled floor and let herself be washed over by the rain, content in its familiar presence. She would have stayed in the balcony until daybreak had the rain not diminished into a drizzle, and then abruptly stopped. Standing up from her seated position, Sophie boldly strode back into the house, confident that the rain would follow her, and that everything would resume as before. When it did not, she nearly collapsed.
Her nose running and her body burning with fever, she entered her room and fell on the bed, wet clothes and all. She curled herself into a ball before shutting her eyes and finally letting the tears flow. As she wept quietly, she buried her face in a pillow and slipped her soaked body beneath the wet, dirtied covers of her bed. Her body shaking with the force of her sobs, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, even as her tears continued to flow, spreading itself in tiny rivulets over the back of her left hand. Staring at this unusual pattern, she raised a finger from her right hand and lightly, ever so lightly, pressed the water to her skin. Then, as an odd yet familiar feeling rose in her, she slowly raised her hands and cupped them around her ears to hear the rain, the blissful, sweet echo of rain.
Sophie sighed, swallowed, smiled, her eyes growing dimmer as the long moments passed into eternity. She drew her knees even closer to her chest, her elbows grazing the sides of her thighs, her tear-stained hands still pressed to her ears. Shuddering in the cold, early morning draft coming in from an open window, she lulled herself to sleep with fleeting, fading thoughts of the rain.
Outside, the sky began to lighten.
Michelle T. Tan is currently a Creative Writing senior at the Ateneo de Manila University. She has participated in a few local writing workshops in the Philippines and has been published in Heights, her university's official literary journal. Two of her works, one short story and one personal essay, are scheduled to come out in the upcoming issue of the same journal.
The rain belonged to no one. This was the first thing Sophie learned in her entire life.
She had only been two years old at the time, when circumstance marked her memory with an unforgettable encounter with rain. Even at that young age, she was able to remember the details of her experience, for as far as babies’ memories go, Sophie’s were a lot clearer than most. And it was her memory of the night of November 2, 1995 that would remain etched in her mind for the next eighteen years.
It had been dusk when Typhoon Rosing first swept over Barangay San Isidro Labrador, flooding its tiny streets and causing panic among its residents. Shouting instructions to each other, families moved their cars to higher ground, beggars scurried to the nearest barangay hall for shelter, and street children rejoiced as they swam across the dark, swirling waters that now flooded the road. Amidst this flurry of activity that spanned the narrow length of Iba Street, no one noticed a uniformed housemaid struggling to close the balcony doors of a tall white house near the corner of Iba and Simoun. Drenched and dripping, almost swaying with the force of the wind, this lone house stood at the far edge of an isolated blackout, its high walls echoing the high-pitched shrieks of a frightened baby.
Her face and hair wet from the rain, the maid in the balcony gripped the sides of a glass door with both hands while attempting to shield the baby stroller beside her from the lashing rain. Positioning her body against the direction of the howling wind, she managed to close the door in one swift movement, but before she could push the other one into place, it swung wildly from a sudden gust of wind and slammed against her with enough force to knock her onto the floor. Just before she passed out from shock and exhaustion, she pulled the stroller aside and attempted to calm the terrified baby inside it with reassuring whispers that could barely be heard above the roar of the wind. Then, against her will, she faded from consciousness, and the child was left alone.
The rest of the day was a nightmare for Sophie. As dusk withered away and darkness slowly crept over the horizon, the periodic flashes of gray lightning became more and more frequent, until her ears were constantly ringing with anticipation, until she could no longer tell noise from silence, darkness from light.
By the time the maid beside her awoke, the baby had ceased crying. Her skin matted with dried tears and rain, she twirled a stray leaf in her hands and continued to stare mutely at the storm outside. Relieved that the child was safe and calm, the maid was about to reach for her when she noticed the strange expression on her face. Following Sophie’s gaze, she looked past the glass doors and saw familiar trees swaying wildly in the wind as the rain outside continued to fall in cold sheets, beating down heavily on roads and rooftops, unrelenting in its fury. Without taking her eyes off the storm, she reached a shaking hand to the baby and gripped her tiny fist tightly. Together, they watched the deluge with a strange stillness, disturbed only by the distant rumble of thunder, the constant pattering of rain on rooftops.
The downpour had still not ceased by the time Sophie’s parents returned home, delayed by four hours of unmoving traffic. Her father had immediately rushed to her side and carried her in his arms, promising that the rain would soon stop and that wind would die down again. Overcome with guilt, her mother had tried to make her go to sleep by singing lullabies to her and rocking her in a cradle, hoping that her daughter would quickly forget the trauma she had experienced.
But Sophie could not rest for a single moment. Despite her father’s promises, the storm still continued to rage outside their house, growing even stronger as the hours passed into midnight, as if determined to prove him wrong. As she lay in her cradle in the dim light of her parents’ room, she looked past the billowing curtains and took in the dark clouds, the incessant rain, the sudden flashes of lightning, and found herself unable to turn away.
In the years that followed, Sophie’s memory of this night would undergo various changes, mostly drawing from her nanny’s exaggerated retellings throughout her childhood. Being the only child in the family, she had the full attention of their housemaid, with whom she spent most of her toddler years. During lazy afternoons, as she ironed and folded clothes in the room they shared, she told Sophie stories of her own eventful childhood, sprinkling them with such fantastic characters as dwarves, fairies, and mermaids. Not surprisingly, the child soon developed a fascination for such tales, and continued to envision them in her mind long after her nanny returned to her province in Leyte. Over the years, she came to invent a lot of adventures for herself, but the one memory that always remained with her was her first encounter with rain. She remembered staring anxiously past the window and into the tempest outside—a single image that would replay itself again and again in her mind in the years to come. No one, she finally came to believe, had any control over the rain.
Which was why she was extremely surprised when it began following her. Six years after her first encounter with rain, she realized it would be a part of her life forever.
At first she thought it was a mistake. She had been at school, eating a cupcake quietly at her desk during recess, when the first drop of water fell on her head. Instinctively, eight-year-old Sophie glanced up at the ceiling, expecting to find a hole or crack of some sort, and was surprised to find nothing but peeling plaster. Puzzled, she reached a hand up to her head just as another drop fell seemingly out of thin air. This time, she caught it with the back of her hand, but as she moved to wipe it on her sleeve, she found no evidence of water on her skin—it was as dry as ever.
Unsure of what to do, she left her cupcake half-uneaten on her desk and exited the classroom, looking around carefully to see if anyone was pulling a prank on her. But no one was paying her even the slightest attention. As she headed for the restroom, she spotted a group of her classmates huddled near the bottom of the staircase, playing marbles. One of them gestured for her to join the game, but the thought of her being surrounded by so many people was enough to send her into a panic. She quickly glanced away, pretending not to have noticed them.
As she rounded an empty corridor, Sophie grew increasingly suspicious of her surroundings and quickened her pace, all the while feeling nonexistent drops of rainwater falling gently, playfully, on her skin. She had just begun doubting herself when the rain began to fall harder. As if in response to the fear and panic rising inside her, drop after drop of unfamiliar rain fell insistently on her arms, shoulders, and head, until her skin began to feel cold and clammy, until her ears were ringing with the patter of rain, but still reality refused to reflect what she was sensing all too vividly.
Utterly bewildered, she stumbled into the restroom and gazed at herself in the mirror. And it was then that she truly saw herself—her reflection standing in the rain, drenched and dripping, her clothes darkened by the downpour, her hair stubbornly sticking to the sides of her face. She could not believe it. She blinked once, twice, before shutting her eyes and locking herself inside an empty stall, where she began to sob uncontrollably.
Her first instinct was to ignore it. She thought that if she did, the rain would eventually leave her alone. But it did not, nor did it reveal its intentions to her. Impossibly, the rain continued to follow her, sometimes resigning itself to a soft drizzle, sometimes building up a deluge, and at other times merely a haze, a cold mist that clung to her skin. Naturally, she told no one. At first, she kept it a secret for fear of being perceived as strange, or worse, different. But as she grew older, Sophie learned to view this peculiarity not as a curse but as a unique gift. She prided herself in knowing that nobody else could experience what she felt on a daily basis, and that no one would ever know.
Eventually, she grew accustomed to the rain. At some point, she even began to appreciate it, for it kept her company in the direst situations, comforting her with reassuring drops and listening to her occasional monologues. Sometimes she imagined the rain would reply to her, imagined only it could understand her. During these times, she often asked the rain why it had decided to follow her, out of so many others, but the rain always remained silent when faced with this question, giving her only a few halfhearted drops in reply.
Once, as Sophie was walking to the school parking lot, the rain changed things for her. It had begun to actually drizzle, the first time since the rain started following her. She stiffened at the sight of real raindrops falling in front of her, around her. The sensation of water on her skin felt no different than usual, and yet at the same time she felt strangely distressed. She knew something was amiss, but she couldn’t tell exactly what. She stopped and waited under the overhanging eaves of a store for several minutes. Something was bound to happen, she could tell.
Just then, the school bell rang for the third time that afternoon, signaling the dismissal for high school students. As if right on cue, an excited throng of uniformed adolescents crowded against the school gates, not at all minding the slight rain. From where she was standing, Sophie could see the lot of them being drenched by the drizzle. She saw a group of boys running towards the open basketball courts. She followed their movements with her eyes as they scattered all over the pavement. She watched the rain soak their undershirts and slide off their skin in small transparent drops. She heard the splash of their feet on puddles, the windy echoes of their excited shouting. She resented the sight of their black hair glistening in the rain. Feeling something tighten inside her chest, she turned to walk stiffly back to the parking lot, ignoring the soft pattering behind her.
Despite everything, Sophie still chose to believe that she was special, that she had somehow been set apart from all the other thirteen-year-old girls in the world. She dreamed her way through high school and distanced herself from her peers. She grew accustomed to tying her hair up in a ponytail and wearing black-rimmed glasses, which she had a habit of pushing up her button nose. Her mother repeatedly told her that bulky glasses did not suit her small face, but she stubbornly refused to listen to her advice. Carrying this look well into her college years, she prided herself with the idea that she was a truly special girl, personally chosen by the rain at eight years of age.
But Sophie’s image of herself was shattered during her last year as a college student. On that day, everything changed. She had been sitting on her usual seat in the library, trying to write her own yearbook write-up, when life came to an unexpected halt. She had been looking back on her nineteen years of life, trying to come up with a first sentence to describe herself, when the rain stopped falling.
Having been used to its constant presence for the past eleven years, Sophie started at its sudden absence. She could only blink in surprise. Even the cold mist that usually surrounded her had gone. Tapping her pen against the table in agitation, she waited for the rain to return. When it did not, a cold, unfamiliar feeling swept across her upper back, and she gritted her teeth in frustration. She felt exposed, naked without the rain, and she could not stand it. Hurriedly gathering her belongings, she rushed out of the library and stepped into the harsh sunlight of early August. She immediately recoiled at the sudden sensation of heat on her bare skin, but took only a moment to steel herself before plunging into the afternoon brightness.
As she made her way past the open tennis courts and into the gymnasium, she kept track of the people passing by from a corner of her eye, and cringed inwardly whenever someone so much as cast a glance at her. She felt a gnawing sense of vulnerability, of blatant, unwanted exposure, and kept her head bent down in an attempt to hide herself. Elbowing her way through the line of girls waiting outside the shower rooms, she quickly entered an empty stall, and—without bothering to take off her clothes—stood under a cold shower.
Sophie welcomed the feel of water on her warm skin. Drenching herself thoroughly, she relished the coldness that enveloped her body as she slowly peeled off her clothes and let the water run over her naked skin. Filling her mouth with its metallic, rusty taste, she untied her ponytail and ran a hand through her damp hair, letting the water seep through to its very roots. Sighing inaudibly, she closed her eyes in bliss as she stood unmoving and let the cold water wash over her, let it consume her entirely.
A loud knock on the door thirty minutes later brought her back to reality. A sharp woman’s voice demanded that she come out of the stall and let the other girls have a turn at the shower. Against her will, Sophie shut off the water and began putting her wet clothes back on, vainly attempting to dry her hair with a thin handkerchief. She emerged from the stall a few moments later, ignoring the many stares that greeted her as she passed through the back exit and walked to the school gates.
It was past dusk when she finally arrived home. Waving away her mother’s greetings, she dropped her school bag and headed straight for the bathroom. Undisturbed, she took her time removing her damp clothes before she stepped under the shower, again savoring the sensation of falling water on her moist skin. Several minutes later, her body sore from standing, she filled a tub with lukewarm water and submerged herself under its clear surface. She remained in that position for the next hour, not even bothering to heat the water when it grew cold from the night air; it didn’t matter that she was sneezing repeatedly, that her fingers and toes were becoming shriveled.
Sophie was just about to drift off to sleep when she was startled by her mother’s voice, calling her for dinner. She clenched her teeth in annoyance before reluctantly standing up and drying herself with a towel. She would have preferred to stay in the bathroom all night, but she did not want to risk her mother’s suspicion. Against her will, she quickly pulled a loose nightgown over her head and waited for the tub to finish draining.
Her father was still at the table when she emerged from her room. Seeing that her mother had already finished eating, she sat down on her accustomed seat and glanced at his plate in an attempt to work up an appetite. It was the worst thing she could have done. Hunched over the table beside her, he had scooped a bit of everything onto his plate without reservation. A heaping of pasta lay on top of soupy rice, and pieces of meat filled up one corner of his plate. Broken strings of noodles lay scattered around his placemat and soup bowl, which lay in a small puddle of spilled water. She looked away in disgust.
As usual, neither of them spoke, and they would have eaten together in silence had it not been for her father’s noisy slurps and the scraping of his silverware against a porcelain plate. Sophie began eating only after her father left the table. Normally a relatively fast eater, she found herself without any appetite and only forced herself to finish the food she had already scooped onto her plate. She did not like leaving things undone.
When she finished eating and washing her share of the dishes more than an hour later, she returned to her room and lay quietly on the bed. Her eyelids heavy with fatigue, she felt her body aching for rest, but could not find it in her to fall asleep. Clasping her hands beneath her head, her hair fanned out on a pillow, Sophie looked up at the ceiling and waited. Despite everything, she still retained some hope that the rain would return, thinking that perhaps it had only been testing her, to see how she would react to its sudden disappearance. In her mind, she repeatedly called out to the rain, hoping that it would listen and come back. She strained her ears for an echo, a ghost of a reply, but she heard nothing except the faint, muffled sounds of television coming from her parents’ bedroom.
Midnight arrived, and still Sophie remained in that position, her mouth set in a frown. She struggled to focus on a single point in the air, from which she expected a raindrop to materialize at any moment. She tried her best not to blink or move, hoping that sheer effort might somehow prompt the rain’s return. Several minutes later, when the truth finally dawned upon her, she could not prevent her eyes from filling up with tears, and she would have finally let them fall had it not been for the sudden downpour of rain.
Sophie could not believe it. Without even bothering to put on her slippers, she hurriedly tumbled out of bed and ran into their open balcony, the rush of rain echoing in her ears. As the first drops fell on her neck and shoulders, she closed her eyes and spun around with her arms spread wide in gratitude, unable to contain her happiness. She didn’t care that she was standing under the rain only in her nightgown, or that some of their neighbors might see her. She didn’t care at all, for in her mind, there was only her and the rain.
For hours, she stood under the heavy downpour, celebrating the rain’s return and relishing every moment of it. When her legs tired of standing, she sat down on the tiled floor and let herself be washed over by the rain, content in its familiar presence. She would have stayed in the balcony until daybreak had the rain not diminished into a drizzle, and then abruptly stopped. Standing up from her seated position, Sophie boldly strode back into the house, confident that the rain would follow her, and that everything would resume as before. When it did not, she nearly collapsed.
Her nose running and her body burning with fever, she entered her room and fell on the bed, wet clothes and all. She curled herself into a ball before shutting her eyes and finally letting the tears flow. As she wept quietly, she buried her face in a pillow and slipped her soaked body beneath the wet, dirtied covers of her bed. Her body shaking with the force of her sobs, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, even as her tears continued to flow, spreading itself in tiny rivulets over the back of her left hand. Staring at this unusual pattern, she raised a finger from her right hand and lightly, ever so lightly, pressed the water to her skin. Then, as an odd yet familiar feeling rose in her, she slowly raised her hands and cupped them around her ears to hear the rain, the blissful, sweet echo of rain.
Sophie sighed, swallowed, smiled, her eyes growing dimmer as the long moments passed into eternity. She drew her knees even closer to her chest, her elbows grazing the sides of her thighs, her tear-stained hands still pressed to her ears. Shuddering in the cold, early morning draft coming in from an open window, she lulled herself to sleep with fleeting, fading thoughts of the rain.
Outside, the sky began to lighten.
Michelle T. Tan is currently a Creative Writing senior at the Ateneo de Manila University. She has participated in a few local writing workshops in the Philippines and has been published in Heights, her university's official literary journal. Two of her works, one short story and one personal essay, are scheduled to come out in the upcoming issue of the same journal.
