puddles

I have never understood why some people like the rain. I am very much a hot-summer-sun, get-out-your-shorts-and-chuck-on-your-t-shirt type of girl. I don’t do wrap-up-in-five-layers-and-whip-out-your-umbrella sort of weather. But there are some people who enjoy the rain. When it rains they feel good to be invisible. I only feel dull and bland. The grey sky restricts my plane of sight and causes the world to appear as if it is caught in a void; a nothingless vacuum. The place where my feet meet the ground is separate from the rest of the universe.

Becky was a rain girl. She was the kind of girl who’d strip down to her underwear and prance around in the rain until she was completely drenched, unable to speak from a sneezing fit prompted by the cold. I have a distant vision of her sneezing through smiles… Sometimes if I was in an agreeable mood she’d convince me to stand outside in the rain with her. But I never experienced rain with the same delight she did. I couldn’t understand how grey-sodden skies could put so much life into a person, how they fuelled laughter and energy. Maybe on cold days people need to create some sort of light within them to stay warm.


Memories.
“Are you excited about the beach this Saturday?” Becky asked me once on the way home from school.
“Mm. The weather,” I murmured.
“It’s alright,” she said, looking down and running the toe of her shoe around the outline of a puddle.
“Do you like your reflection?” she asked. “In the puddle. Do you like it or no?”
“It’s different to a mirror,” I replied, “I look funny in the puddle. My face is all blurry and muddy coloured.”
“Pretty though,” Becky mused.
I frowned down at myself all out of skew.
“I think it is,” she said.

On Saturday we packed our beach bags, remembering our combs for when we came out of the surf. Our hair was always such a shambles after being tumbled around by the waves like loose coins in a purse. As we hovered in the water I informed Becky that I liked the sea better than puddles.
“I can’t see my reflection in here at all,” I explained.
“Why wouldn’t you want to see your reflection?” she asked. “It’s just yourself.”

By the time we got out my skin tasted of salt and my hair was an atrocity piled on the top of my head. Disgusted, I picked my way through the sandy fish egg infested mess. I envied Becky. Her hair was so fine she could run her fingers through it and it’d dry soft and straight. Even with numerous comb-throughs mine stubbornly refused to comply. Bedraggled, I gave up with a loud and disgruntled Oh! to make my point.

Becky looked at me, a neutral and momentary stare. I returned the stare, perplexed. I watched as the giggles crept up her throat, twisted her lips and escaped - bursting - from her mouth.
“What?!” I demanded, appalled that she was laughing at me. “What’s wrong with me?!”
My hands jerked up to touch my face, examine my cheeks.
“Becky what’s wrong with me?!” I shouted.
Silence.
Her stare returned, but her eyes traced mine with a secret.
“Whaa-aat?” I whined, desperate.
Becky just shook her head. I wanted to slap her.


I often replay this moment in my head with the most intense curiosity. Random memories and moments stick with you for no apparent reason, more vivid than some you’d prefer to recall. For instance the precise details of a particular time in my childhood come easily: My mother presents me sliced apple in a blue china bowl as I sit reading in the lounge. Irrelevant. Yet I can see the furniture arranged in its exact position in the room. The apple lying lifelessly in its bowl, its green skin suggesting it should be avoided. What a waste of brain capacity this memory must be. Perhaps if this stupid memory was not here taking up space I’d remember Becky’s expression better. I’d be able to figure out what it meant.

***

I’ve never understood why people dislike the rain. I love summer, how the days stretch on and the sky radiates warmth, but I have always found rain so much more exciting. You can kick puddles so they make swissssh noises and splatter the ground with inscrutable shapes. You can paint the world with your own colours because it becomes a blank canvas of white. When the sun shines the world is clearly visible and nothing is secret. Effort is not required to see in colour and so the mind takes happiness for granted. You can become dangerously lethargic in this state.

I used to have a friend once who was a sun girl. People don’t have to be alike, you see, to be friends. In fact the more opposite you are the more you can learn from them. So I was quite lucky to have a sun girl, once.

“Bad weather” – that’s what sun people call rain. It’s “dull” or “dismal” or “dreary.” People’s sadness catches up with them when it rains, leeches onto their thoughts and words. The whole world seems to slow down, become a painful pantomime of what it formerly was. I wonder: if the sun never returned, would people learn to create their own sunshine? Invention comes from necessity, I heard.

What we invented was distance. We morphed our friendship into something else: Reflections being scattered by crashing waves. The smallest ripple can travel so far; rings of doubt disrupt tranquil surfaces. The sea was “better” she told me. No reflections. No doubt confronting you. Only waves to disintegrate uncertainty. Water to dissolve friendship.

Friendship bracelets. We used to tie them around each others’ wrists but in the end we might as well have choked them around each others’ throats, tugged each other along like nuisance pets. “I hate you!” she’d yell, lines learned from movies and brattish kids scorning their mothers on the street. “You don’t understand, you don’t know!” Secrets she desperately wanted to disclose but couldn’t for the risk of tears. Tears are water, and therefore a reminder of old times. The beach, puddles. Rain. The ripples of doubt gradually grew bigger, trust faded as more stones of hurt were thrown in. At this point, it was no longer possible to simply comb out the knots.

***

Becky thought it was something ‘fixable’, an illness or injury. Injury to pride, perhaps. There’s a moment where you realise things can’t continue as they are, you feel change pulling at your fingertips, coaxing you to give in. We grow up and we discard people who no longer fit our puzzle of ideals. We drown them from our minds so that they no longer hinder us. We learn to avoid optimism so that we may avoid disappointment when our expectations fail to be met. In time, we come to realise that rain leaves you sodden, that friends who smile cannot cure doubt, and that by letting go of rain girls you are keeping their hope in tact.

Or was I, if letting go hurt?

At the time I thought it was right. At the time this was my logic. Discard girls who were happier than me. Prettier than me. Girls who danced in the rain. Who liked their own reflection. It’d make way for my own goodness... What little of it there was. I was only a sapphire: Alluring, until compared with a diamond. But if the diamond is removed from the sapphire’s side then the sapphire may shine brilliantly.


On Monday night I walked home by myself. I didn’t wait for Becky outside the back of M block. I let her go, let her sparkle alone, let the rain pour onto her body and lift her head upwards to the sky. Alone. She blinked delicately as the rain seeped through her lashes and ran into the corners of her eyes.

I didn’t sit with Becky at lunch on Tuesday, nor Wednesday. Nor did I go to the beach with her that weekend. Instead I spent my hours at home, imagining life now, and contemplating which colour best complimented sapphire.