Sweet Petrichor and a Soul Full of Dread

I have always loved when it rains ever since I was a kid. Rushing out the door to the damp garden just to get a big whiff of the earthy petrichor and feeling the cool breeze pass through my hair. 

It was the sweetest feeling that my youthful soul had ever experienced. Not until I wake up to a room with soaked linoleum. 

In my teenage years, something that would cheer me up after a stressful day would be the bed waiting for me on Friday night—a cold room, fresh sheets, and a Bluetooth speaker playing sounds from rain showers and thunder. 

That was the epitome of the perfect rest for my soul. 

Then the rains grew stronger, more violent than I had  experienced as a kid. Torrential downpours, jolting lightning, and the nightmare I feared most: a flooded home. 

The very first time I experienced that, the image of a rainy night became a nightmare for the boy who had regarded the rain as a cot for his soul. 

But the rain had not changed on its own.
Somewhere between the skies and my doorstep, something had failed to hold it back.

As I grew up and my eyes began to widen, it was no longer what was falling from the clouds or the climate change my science teacher taught in sixth grade. It lived in broken systems, crumbling dams, clogged canals, and broken promises from the names blaring from campaign vans during the election season. 

Reality swept through my innocence like a storm that no longer needed permission to break in. I was born in July—most of my birthdays were spent during the monsoon season, blowing out a candle on a packaged cupcake while floodwater quietly crept up the legs of my bed.

And somewhere between the drops of wax on the cupcake and the rising water on my bed’s legs, I learned that even celebrations could learn how to drown; that petrichor was no longer a scent but a warning; that thunder was no longer something to admire, but something to fear.