Rain 18 -

There is a specific kind of rain that only falls when you are eighteen.

She looked at me for a long time. Then she sat down next to me on the wet curb. She threw the broken umbrella into the street, where it bounced once and disappeared into a gutter.

I waved. I stayed.

I turned off my computer. I walked outside. I sat on the curb in front of my building—a different curb, in a different city, in a different life. A neighbor yelled, "Hey, you're going to get wet!"

"That's the best reason I've ever heard," she said. Rain 18

We sat there for an hour. We didn't exchange numbers. We didn't kiss. We just watched the water rise. She told me she was moving to Portland in the morning. I told her I was staying here, even though I didn't know where "here" was. When the rain finally slowed to a whisper, she stood up, brushed off her wet jeans, and walked away without saying goodbye.

The rain remembers. Even if you don't.

It isn't the soft, forgiving drizzle of childhood that sends you running indoors for hot chocolate. Nor is it the desperate, apocalyptic downpour of your late twenties, when a flood in your basement apartment means a $2,000 deductible and a fight with your landlord. No, Rain 18 is different. It is the theatrical, romantic, devastatingly loud rain of transition.