I rode the train up north and took pictures. Every twenty minutes or so I had to stop and find a place to hide from a renewed downpour. I made the best of it, and on the ride back home I told myself that it had been a good day.
On the second day it rained a little more. Many grumbled about clothes not being dry. Others spent extra minutes putting on overheated rain gear before mounting scooters and heading off to work. Still others wondered if a typhoon might be coming, and what such a typhoon might portend for activities planned long before. How much rain, and for how long?
I tried to amuse myself in a department store. I got there around 11, and took in all of the stores from the top floor to the bottom. After doing so I had lunch in the food court, and while I ate I watched people emerge through the automatic doors from the rain outside. Their clothes were wet and their faces flush from a change in temperature.
On the fourth day it rained in earnest. People all over the island glanced down at their phones and saw flood and landslide alerts. Drivers picked up too much speed on wet roads, killing themselves, other motorists, or oblivious pedestrians. They all blamed the weather,.
I had to drive to the other side of the island and back. I didn't think the roads would be a problem. Just south of the city I drove through a large pool of water sitting on top of the roadway. As I continued through this pool I worried over my car's engine, and hoped there weren't any holes hiding under the water.
On the eighth day the rain came down in torrents. Some of the older houses collapsed. Rivers, full to bursting, washed away bridges. Several tourist sites were buried under avalanches of trees and mud. Flights out of the airports became irregular, and trains stopped working in certain areas.
I stayed home and wondered at the leaks emerging in my ceiling. I put buckets down here and there, only to find new leaks erupt as I did so. I ran the air conditioner to limit the moisture indoors, but I could tell that this same air conditioner would give out soon. It was no match for the droplets radiating through the air around me.
By the sixteenth day the rain had only paused once or twice, and in-between gusts of unforgiving precipitation we sought shelter, claiming reasons for avoiding whatever responsibilities we had that day. Food became scarce in the convenience stores, and vehicles left outside stopped functioning. Highways became impassible, and entire mountainsides relinquished their foliage. When, we asked each other, would it stop?
I had to abandon my apartment a few days before. Nothing worked there anymore. I moved into a hotel across the street, lugging my essentials through the deluge to a room that I could only afford to occupy for so long. The hotel staff greeted me with tight expressions. None of the other guests in the hotel looked glad to be there.
On the thirty second day the rain still hadn't abated, and we watched from wherever we were as civilization fell apart around our ears. The sturdier buildings began to erode and fall over, while most of the roads were little more than suggestions submerged beneath gathering pools and rivers full to bursting. Some of us called back to the other countries which we'd come from, and said goodbye to people suffering from other ills, in other places.
I watched from my hotel window as an apartment building - that same apartment building that I'd just come from - listed to one side and began sinking towards a row of smaller houses beneath it. The skies remained a steely gray, and in that moment I finally realized that the rain would not stop, not until everything we had built and saved and hoped for had ceased to be. It didn't matter whose fault it was - it just was.
As I sat there a middle-aged woman emerged from the first floor below into the ceaseless rain. She looked upward towards where I was sitting but failed to see me, her eyes wide and uncomprehending. I sat transfixed as her clothes slowly fell from her body without her moving a muscle, and then, without even the smallest drop of blood or reaction on her part, her skin began to slough away from her rigid, standing form. This degloved suit of flesh immediately dissolved upon contact with the flooded street beneath her, a pink stain quickly dispersed by the ongoing downpour.
I stared at her visible musculature for a few seconds before it too began to dissolve from her skeletal frame. The organs within this skeleton, unprotected by muscle and sinew, then melted away in turn. She stood below me as the merest rudiments of a human being, and quickly thereafter the rest of her collapsed in on itself with an audible splash, her remains washed from my sight by the rain, the merciless rain that had already been with us for so long, so unbearably long that I had to close my eyes against its sheer imperturbability.
As cracks spread in the hotel ceiling above me, as the storm raged without, I could almost feel the mountains melt away to the west, and all of it - all of it - slowly washing out to sea. There will be no graves to mark our passing, only a future patch of ocean, on some sunny day in the future, where all of our dreams and fears have been laid to rest.
Related Entries:
