The sky splits and weeps with the reckless abandon of a teenage girl. Heaven has sprung a leak. In Thailand, the tropical winter arrives with percussion—a million liquid fingers drumming against tin roofs.
In these latitudes, winter wears no white shroud. It comes draped in translucent sheets that hang from eaves, transforming gravel streets into mirrored rivers. The monsoon arrives like an uninvited auntie who moves into your bedroom, rearranges your schedule, and, in a way, your mind too.
The mind becomes waterlogged, thoughts moving with the viscosity of honey. Rain invokes a kind of inward contemplation, where life pauses and you are forced inside.
In the West, winter quiets the world under the snow’s hush, numbing the landscape into dormancy. In Thailand, winter screams. It purges. The rain hammers down confession after confession onto the earth. Dirt turns to mud. Things float. Nothing stays buried during monsoon.
Inside jungle shelters, there’s a peculiar intimacy with water's voice—a keen sense of listening. You learn to distinguish between the urgent clatter of heavy drops on metal and the gentler susurration against the leaves. Sometimes the rain will pause, as if to catch its breath, but within minutes, it returns with renewed fury. You decipher when it’s safe to leave the house and when to surrender to hibernation, remaining indoors under blankets.
Sleep becomes a negotiation. Monsoon season doesn’t tiptoe; it announces itself with thunder and continual clatter. The rain makes the ocean livid, and the wind whips against its surface. You try to remember the summer days when this vast body of water was pacified. The fuming rage of nature will pass, the way one's moods inevitably do.
In moments of reprieve, the world steams. Plants grow with eagerness, and vines claim walls overnight. Mold forms in abandoned spaces, like squatters overtaking an empty warehouse.
The mind, too, grows in the fertile darkness. There are weeks spent at home, trapped in a one-bedroom room while the world outside floods. Dense thoughts take root, and ideas sprout and tangle like jungle undergrowth. The rain conjures a melancholia that is brokenly poetic, stirring a tenderness of heart. You can’t help but look out the window in silence, and the looking becomes meditation.
You are baptized in the holy waters the sky has wrung out. You emerge clean. The psyche, like the earth, bears the marks of the water that has washed over it. New channels are carved where hard resistance and rigid ground once stood. The rain softens things, turning them damp and flexible.
Then, eventually, the rain halts, and the sun appears once again like a bulb in the sky. The reunion is warm. When the waters recede and the sun illuminates everything, you are exposed to the world outside your bedroom. The rain has made the trees more vibrant, the colors denser, and little life sprouts from the dirt.
Nature has proven how important it is to let yourself weep.
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