Lost in transit

Downpour

My body aches from running around helping ungrateful unaware unappreciative people at work all day. I want to take my shoes off but I can't just yet. I sit in the Brookhaven station for an hour, waiting for the Number 19.

And then, it starts to pour.

People from other parts of the world are often disconcerted by the torrential downpours that people from the tropics find soothing.

Where we are comforted into concomitance, everyone else becomes fidgety.

As a displaced tropical person, a member of the tropical diaspora, I am agitated in the rain because I know that this is not like the rain at home.

At home, you make chick-ee-chongs and pelt other children in the rain at four, bathe and climb guava trees in the rain at six, and continue some sort of rain ritual for the rest of your life until you're that old soucouyant looking character who meddles outside in the rain, chooking her bougeanvilleas until they look like they're collecting enough to drink and grow to be full enough to give to the neighbour's daughter just before her wedding for good luck because Lord knows that child badlucky.

A torrential downpour doesn't frighten. The hurricanes and tornadoes that make the headlines in the USA are small drizzles that don't make it to page 6 from the back in our news.

And so, when I am home, I love the rain.

But sitting in the Brookhaven Marta Station waiting for the Number 19, after a whole day of scuffling after white people isn't the kind of setting for a good rain session.

So I call him, hoping he'll answer and will soothe me with his equally tropical soul. He doesn't answer. He must be in the lab or something.

It rains in the Caribbean and I want to be outside running around in it, with my feet firmly in the reddish brown earth. I want to be inside, sleeping to it, waking to a clean, sea-bay smell, swatting the rain flies from my face and yawning. It rains in the United States and I'm scared and upset, sitting at a bus stop for an hour.

Posted by Miko at November 27, 2003 07:51 AM