for rain and for sun

It’s been raining in Manila for over a week already. I love the rain but it appears to be overstaying this time around. My heart is like the soil in this city, saturated; my words, like the streets, slippery but reflective. Walking on liquefied rainbows, carrying peculiar joys and sorrows, the weather’s relentlessness has nurtured too many thoughts for a man who is quite easily a victim of over thinking. The saudade from last Sunday still has its remnants lingering inside my soul. Shaking off the nostalgia is a difficulty rarely undertaken in this kind of weather.

Luckily, I had some bright spots last week. In spite of the weather, I, along with a few of my colleagues, decided to go swimming in the penthouse of a friend’s place. Even though the pool was frigid, the sensation of floating and being so close to the sky was a much a needed moment. Being submerged was necessary. After our health-defying swim, we enjoyed the view of the city’s evening skyline. Gail force winds rushed across the roof deck, but its swiftness was more than welcomed as we absorbed the neon hues emanating from steel towers piercing the thin, urban air.

A different view was what I needed. Forty floors up, the whole world looked so small. The sky, adorned by a moon slightly faded by wintry clouds, looked heavier than usual. Below us, the streets were decorated by traffic, and scurrying men and women going home from work looked like ants a giant god could so easily trample. Looking down, I wondered terrifyingly about those who killed themselves via gravity. Everything that makes us, us – bones, blood, muscle, nerves – splattered on the ground. Such scenes playing in my head cut through the seeming invincibility of humanity. We’re all crippled by mortality but also offered salvation because of it.

I took the bus on my way home from the swimming and sightseeing. It was raining as usual, the same one which was the pleasant, trickling background to last, last Friday’s intimate dealings. This time, though, I was on my own as I watched Manila washed down the sewers. Then it hit me, how much I have missed the clearer days: sun-filled mornings, sweltering afternoons, and humid evenings which always left me without sleep. I missed the freedom of not carrying an umbrella, and the warmth of glorious shafts of sun on my skin. I missed the plankton-like dusts swirling in the sunlight. Though I love the rain, there has been too much of it for my own comforts, too much of it without any explanation that unsettles.

If growing older and wiser have actually manifested, it’s my desire to keep things in proportion now: equal love for truth, equal desire for opinion; equal love for romance, equal desire for pragmatism; equal love for rain, equal desire for sun.

There was an incredible downpour a few hours ago. It was a strange thing to be in the office, watching the rain whip across the skyline, and batter our building’s windows. Several stories up, the view of an afternoon downpour is quite different.

It was strange. Inside the office it was absolutely quiet. You knew the rain was throwing itself across the sky – visibility was next to nothing – and the windows were sprayed hard until a thin sheet of waterfall cascaded from it. But inside the office it was calm. If your eyes were closed, you would not know the difference between a clear afternoon and a heavy downpour.

It was strange – the disconnect between sight and sound, and sensation. Cloistered in a modern, gleaming skyscraper, there was an eerie calm. The force of nature was muffled by the constant buzz of the air-conditioning. The rage of the rain silenced by something as simple as an earphone delivering a song apt for the occasion: Garbage’s I’m Only Happy When It Rains.

Rains, storms, typhoons – these are forces of nature experienced, not just observed. Confined in a safe place, these natural animations looked so trivial, so paradoxical, so harmless.

The rain. An endless source of inspiration. Every drizzle, every thunderstorm, every downpour - an inescapable, living metaphor for the way I feel. You are like the rain. You quench the thirst of weary hearts. My love, my affections are like the rain: avoidable, but unstoppable. Is there even any question or doubt to this matter? That I love the rain the way love’s supposed to be: a moment, a deluge, a force of Nature, the ferocious anti-dote to the confinements of individual turmoil. And that the rain is this divine vision of what an earthly emotion can do. Precipitation: when the weight of every thing in every day succumbs to gravity. The rain brings pleasure and pain.

The commute home was splendid. It was raining the whole day, and when I got out of the office mid-afternoon, the drizzle was gradually becoming a downpour. I enjoyed every minute of it - walking and getting my feet wet in the puddles forming on the pavements, the occasional umbrella bump with someone which showered cradled drops on my elbows, and the plain coolness of the air. I was wearing slippers, as I had anticipated that the weather was going to be wet and I did not want to risk damage on any of my few sneakers. Everything else was perfect.

I loved how the rain made the train ride bearable. As with rush hour, the carriage I got in was cramp. But I stood near the door with the best moving views, earphones plugged to shut off the world out, and Nessun Dorma as the perfect soundtrack to the nostalgic afternoon. Next thing I knew, I was at my station, as the last operatic notes thrilled my senses.

When I got off Cubao, my shuffled playlist brought Edith Piaf. Her warm voice on La Vie En Rose was the perfect contrast to the slight tropical chill. Looking at the street vendors, the impossibly obvious motels, and countless thrift stores, I felt like this was just the best way to start the week. Yes, tomorrow is Valentine’s and like the past years since I was conscious enough to fear the event, I understood the implications of being alone on such a day, but I could care less. This was me. This was my life. I make the best when I am on my own, and often times, I am at my best on my own. In the same way Manila is best and worst when it rains, the circumstances I find myself in lend its own cautious ambivalence to who I am.

Nothing was worth more than the confidence I placed on my decisions. I knew, with the help of the rain and the music, one day, all the mysteries will be answered.

Bad weather. Bed weather.

Gleaming steel towers were cloaked in the mist of a December affair. Visibility was low and windows were fogged. Outside, grayish clouds ominously hovered, occasionally dousing a shower on already damp streets. Yet for the most part, the clouds were restrained to a drizzle, sprinkling a gentle mist which varnished cold, steel and glass structure, and polished any other polluted infrastructure. The rain fell down like music, melodies from a pied piper, which called out to those who had risen to go back to sleep. It was a battle. Waking up was a much harder choice when eerie somnolence turned up.

Mint-cool winds breezed in between the downtown valleys, and where air rushed, young soldiers of commerce shivered. City columns appeared decapitated, their antennas and spires, their uppermost floors lost in a hazy texture of nature.

All appeared still as the quiet contentment of another misty December morning slowly gave way to a nostalgic holiday spirit. I was sure everyone, at that moment in time, could have afforded to be sentimental.

I stuck to my coffee. It was instant. You tear open the small package and drain the grains into a nice cup, and you let the bitter warmth to pierce through earthenware, bone china, porcelain or stoneware. A fresh cup of joe in my palms was all it took for my spine to tingle. Everything else was nothing. Everything else was passing.

Even him. Even my thoughts of him. Even my thoughts to him. They were muddled, and turned to puddles of liquefied rainbow, draining into sewers where all things were of a black gradient, the perfect contrast to the holy white which had enveloped Manila.

monsoon rains

The monsoon rain flashed lightning across Manila’s tarnished skyline and crackled with thunder, blanketing the upper reaches of skyscrapers with a white haze. In a cubicle, I sat, with the fierce longing to feel the cold betrayal of the clouds, aching for a cigarette to calm the nerves. I would be expecting traffic with the kind of weather. And I would also be expecting you.

Expectations, as a film had so greatly explained, rarely ran congruent to reality. They have misled and will continue to mislead people.

My gaze was set upon the office window, thirty floors up, into the urban wilderness which had now taken in an almost winter-like purity, a blizzard-like ambiguity, a cold and extremely distant memory. The tall buildings which had accompanied ours were now gone in the cloak of the tropical weather. I could not see anything, anymore and there was the impression, I had been gazing for too long, my work had been left to linger as the moment’s natural vanity pulled my conscience.

This must be heaven. Nothing else around. Nothing in between, nothing on the edges. It must be a nothingness, a whiteness unstained by mortality, or anything terribly human, and corruptible. The whole place unhindered by a past full of regrets, living on a present that would never expire, firmly placing its hope on a tomorrow that had, as a rhyme would best put it, no sorrow.

july thunderstorms

These short bursts of rain catches the umbrella-less by surprise. From afar, everyone looks like they are wading in some mist. The rumble of the fallen, the splatter of the crash, the drops desperately hanging on to edges in their last effort to be an individual before materialising as a puddle. And soon everything is blanketed by an immaculate glaze. Slippery, even slimy but also so sensual, the waters that trickle on the tips of lush leaves.