The syncopation of rain

Why did I not write about this rain when it was pouring all the time? Why do I all of a sudden feel the need to share now, on a perfectly sunny day? My take on it is that now that this rainy madness is finally over, I feel a little nostalgic for the days that I was stranded at home because it was simply impossible to step outside. This nostalgia makes me idealize the days that it rained. Of course, in reality it was quite depressing. And upsetting too, since my friends had to cancel their trip on July 4^th and now god knows when they will be coming here…

It rained for 3 weeks straight. For a greater effect, I want to say that I have never seen so much water pour from the sky all at once, but I would be lying. I saw it in Brazil last year. It was actually worse over there. On the other hand, it lasted only a week. They said it was some kind of a tropical depression. It very well may have been, but it certainly wasn’t any kind of a tropical rain – this happy 15-minute downpour when you can see half of the sky being completely cloudless and blue and think that if you run fast to that side of the sky you can probably escape the drops, and you laugh at the idea. No, this time it rained all the time. Day after day, I fell asleep to the sound of raindrops and I woke up to the sound of raindrops. I almost forgot that I had an ocean view: it completely disappeared behind the misty shroud of this continuous downpour.

Apparently, a few windows in my house are leaking. I had to put rags under them so that I don’t step into puddles. The rain also tried to sneak in through the front door and the balcony door. So I had to put more rags to create the seal.

The rain didn’t bring any relief from the heat, and although some days were actually a bit cooler (around 72F), most of the time it was like a steam room outside. Once I peeked out the door wearing my glasses, and they immediately fogged up.

I felt hostage to the rain. I spent most of this time alone. Nobody wanted to venture out in such terrible weather, plus it was pretty dangerous: the town is not prepared for such amount of water and there are no proper drains in the streets, so flooding occurs very quickly, in a matter of minutes. I had to ride in the back of a scooter once and at some point we were up to our waist in the water, literally. Of course, I just had to do something stupid. I saw an opening in the sky and decided (based on nothing in particular, just sheer hope) that the rain would break for a couple of hours. So I set out to ride my bike. I didn’t have any specific reason to do this, just wanted to feel myself around something that is not my house. Some ten minutes later, as soon as I reached downtown, the downpour resumed. The stupidity of my riding the bike was quickly trumped by the stupidity of my wearing glasses instead of contacts! What was I thinking? It’s very difficult and dangerous to ride a bike in such rain, and it’s actually absolutely impossible to do it when you see absolutely nothing because your glasses don’t have wipers. So I walked the bike home, by feel. It took me about 30 minutes. Needless to say, I was drenched. That was my first and last attempt to get out of the house during those 3 weeks.

I watched a lot of movies and TV shows. That was good. I discovered this wonderful website – www.cuevana.tv. You can find a lot of old and new movies on it, and a lot of TV shows too, even Seinfeld! Although it’s a Mexican website and all the movie descriptions are in Spanish, don’t let it discourage you – everything is actually in English, just with Spanish subtitles which you can switch off. I don’t; it’s fun for me to watch something in English and read it in Spanish right away, some translations are very illuminating.

I was happy that I didn’t have to work. In diving that is. Because diving happens any time, rain or shine. Unless, of course, the port is closed because of a storm. Javier had to work on some days and he looked miserable when he came over after.

I did a lot of social networking and wrote a lot of articles for our website.

I read a lot.

And STILL I had a lot of time left. I never fully realized before how much time social interactions and little errands take. If you stop by a little grocery with no lines to buy, say, apples, you’ll probably spend some time selecting them, fiddling for change to pay for them, saying hello and thank you and have a nice day to the cashier. Boom – 10 minutes of your day gone (or half an hour if you are in Mexico). If you stop by your office to say hi to Sherief, you come in, put your bike against the wall, sit down with a glass of water for a little chit-chat, and all of a sudden Javier comes in and a couple of other people stop by, and you chat and you laugh and you argue. Boom – at least 40 minutes of your day gone (or sometimes a couple of hours). And how many little things like this do we have to do during our regular day? I guess they all add up and we feel like we never have time for ourselves. At least, I feel this sometimes. But now that I was forced to be home alone with all this time for myself, I honestly didn’t know what to do with it.

I wasn’t bored. I never get bored, I don’t think I can even start to understand what “boredom” means. There’s always something to occupy yourself with, there’s always something interesting around or inside you to ponder. I just felt – and it’ll probably sound weird – like I had those unusual gaps of complete and pure emptiness in between my activities. Let me try to explain. Normally, I kind of smoothly go from one activity to the next, from one thought to the next, it just happens naturally, you just live your day sort of like by free associating. This time it was different. When one activity was finished, there was a distinct pause, during which I had to ask myself “So, what’s next?” The answer would come almost immediately, but the point is that I HAD to ask it, it didn’t just flow naturally. It felt strange.

It is also strange that I feel so compelled to write about this rain. But maybe it’s not that strange. After all, it was really beautiful, on many-many levels…