I am alone in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. White smog envelopes the small town like a cloak. The trees are blotches in the distance, shimmering with a tint of green amidst the dark of night. Near the wooden houses and rickety corner stores, streetlights sparkle silver like disco balls from the high school dance. If I look closely, I see faces in them. They are laughing at me with a wry smile.

Snow covers the asphalt, and the ground is slippery beneath me. The fuzzy snow boots that my mom picked up at a nearby store feel foreign on my feet as I stare in awe at chunky pieces of ice falling onto my nose. I clutch my hands to my sides and squeeze my eyes shut as I feel my body shiver and look around frantically. I remember what my mom said before she left: “You don’t know anyone. Keep your head down, and don’t cause no trouble.”

My mom is on an airplane, headed home - home is now miles away. If I think hard, the snow looks a little like sand. The white flakes in my hair are just like when I was little, playing on the beach. The white sand always clumped into my hair, and I hated it then because of how much work it caused afterwards. My mom spent hours with a rattail comb, flicking the grains of sand from my scalp and warning me to be more careful. Now, surrounded by large, uninviting houses, I wish I was on the airplane with her. I wish I had stayed home.

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I never liked the rain. When the rain came, it washed away the dirt stains on the driveway and rinsed my family’s blue caravan. The flowers bowed their heads as the heavy droplets fell from the clouds, and the sky turned gray. The beach just down the hill from my house formed a thick fog, and my stomach churned quickly like the waves. My mother always advised my siblings and me to stay inside, and I was forced into my own head.

Mummy appreciated the rain because it would fill the water tanks in the yard. It meant we had a few extra days of running water and could afford extra showers. For my Grammy, it was the dead sending a sign and God bringing down blessings. It rained at Grandpa’s funeral and when my uncle died.

I never saw the blessings that the rain brought, and I always thought that it was because I was too young to notice what the adults around me did. As a child, I did not have to worry about how the water tanks would be filled - it was my mother’s problem. I did not have to worry about how the patio would get washed or how the garden would get watered.

But even as I got older, my appreciation for the rain did not increase. I sat in the living room of my new family home, scrolling through my phone and reflecting on old family photos. An earthy scent filled my nose as the rain was about to start, and I cried because I remembered my grandpa, buried days to my ninth birthday. I cried because I remembered my uncle, his thin figure and contorted face as he turned into a shell of himself on the hospital bed. I cried because I remembered six-year-old me, dazed and confused, as my parents fought in the kitchen and it poured outside.

I cried because I remember the destruction that lay in the wake of storms.

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Drifting

Alone.

Buried in the folds

of the water,

under pastel clouds.

I don’t need help.

I want to be here.

To feel, to drift,

in beat with the waves.

The sun has disappeared now.

Orange lights enchant me from just across the ocean,

where the horizon holds large mountains,

standing tall and still,

towering over the blur of flesh and metal.

My heart feels warm

as I face the mountains,

and scoop a handful of water into my palms.

The blue swirls around, traces the outline of my hand,

and I look through the transparent droplets

like a mirror.

I’m a child again.

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If these walls could feel, they would mourn

the crumbling ground beneath them,

filled with gritty cement and weeds.

They would curse

the abandoned garden,

once plowed and mowed weekly, teeming with rabbits

father bought.

If these bed posts could whisper out

among the rubble,

they would wonder where the time had gone,

and the little girls who clung

to them for comfort at night

and scratched their initials lovingly in the wood.

The room looked how they last left it,

bed intact

stains burned into the wooden dresser

where mother worked their tender heads into braids.

Out the room’s window, overlooking the driveway,

no one played there anymore.

No more noisy kids

wheeling their bikes around,

but if you listened closely,

you could hear

a faint blend of giggles,

beneath the sapodilla tree,

children calling to each other

in gleeful ignorance.

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