Rain is refreshing in a strange, backward way. It shocks you out of a deep, prolific lapse of participation in reality and reminds you that you’re still here. You’re still corporeal, tangible, you can feel and you can decide. But rain is still rain. It can be cold and unpleasant to be faced with, or it can be warm and welcoming. Beconing you forth to splash and smile in the reality you forgot still applied to you.
    I left behind the idea of full, around the clock consciousness during my last frigid thunderstorm. I realized, during a session already dedicated to realizations, how exhausting it was trying to live my reality to its current extent. How frustrating and soul-crushing it is to have the ambition you truly believed in and planned to embark upon, forgone by the limits of a situation you have no control over. I kept a small jar of ideas and plans in the very back corner of my closet. They were safe, they couldn’t be taken out back and shot nor could they be taunted and destroyed from the inside out. When I was cornered in my intruded closet, when I was taken by the collar and shaken for my truth, they were found. Both above-mentioned circumstances played out shortly but in the opposite order. That’s when it began to rain.
    I decided on an alternative: selective awareness. I keep myself alive only feeling and participating when the rain is tepid and pleasant. When I feel the temperature beginning to drop, I fall back asleep, floating through lull and lash, until the sun comes to change the course of my simulation. For days, all I will see is fog. I’m lost and isolated, but that lack of direction comes with an onset of contentedness. There is no one who can see me wandering through a deluded course I have set for myself. I don’t know where I’m walking, I don’t know what’s in front of me, so the warm rain will give me a pleasant surprise as it melts away the fog and gives me hope for sustainable warmth.
    The cloudiness that lingers in my head, even when I’m experiencing kindness and sensitivity, reminds me that my effort to make my reality more livable is as viable as staying completely shrouded in fog until I wander off the edge of a cliff. Eventually, as I age out of my simulation, I’ll have skin thick enough to withstand the hailstorm I’ll be forced to reckon with. Resilience is necessary, but hope exists. I often forget it does while I’m wondering, but serenity and light remind me that fog isn’t all I’ve devolved into. Rain will come, and so will spring.