What is it about the rain that makes us so nostalgic? I’ve wondered this before and tried to make sense of it, just as I am in this moment. I’m walking slowly in the city, balancing my oversized umbrella on my shoulder and a steaming coffee in one hand. It’s drizzling, the borderline between real rain and nothing at all, where you’re constantly questioning whether you actually need an umbrella. The skies are slate gray and that’s when I realize that maybe I feel this way because they are the color of your eyes. Or maybe because of the way you’d look at me when you wanted me and I could see a storm brewing in them, I swear they got darker with desire, your hand on the back of my neck sending lightning down my spine.

Now it’s raining harder.

The pitter patter of the drops like a heartbeat and I suddenly remember how fast mine was as you kissed me in a downpour and the sky opened up around us. It takes me back to simpler moments that I took for granted- running with you, tucked into your trench coat and under one umbrella, trying to find refuge in the warm glow of a Parisian restaurant. You hadn’t made reservations, you never did and I used to hate that about you. Now it just makes me smile as I think about how much better it always turned out anyways, like that time we stood under the portici in Bologna for hours, talking about our future. We didn’t know it at the time that we wouldn’t be in each other’s. Do you remember that awful rainy day in New York? It was our first day in the city and we awoke to a full blown autumn storm, the kind that seemed to shake skyscrapers. We spent the whole day in bed in the Egyptian cotton sheets, ordering room service and singing karaoke to MTV. The way you butchered the lyrics with your imperfect English just made me fall for you more. The rain. It was there that night in your car, an Alfa Romeo wasn’t it? We parked it on a dark road in your hometown on a Saturday night and did what teenagers do on dark roads on a Saturday night. The rain hammering the roof. You wrote TVB into the steam in the windows and when I asked you what it meant, you smiled. That’s the thing about rain, it’s been a part of beautiful moments that I usually try to forget because they belong to our past lives.

Then there was the last time I saw you, tears streaming down my face like rain down that hotel window in New York, down the car door window on a Saturday night. I wipe away a runaway tear, or is it just the rain?

It seems like the worst is over now, I put a hand out from under my umbrella to make sure, close it, slide it under my arm, and keep walking.