YOU ARE THE RAIN
by Tetsuro Shigematsu
72 percent. That's how much water is in your body. And that water has been around here on earth for 4 and half billion years.
That means, the moisture in your breath was once at the center of glacier during the ice age. In your frozen form, you carved valleys through unnamed mountain ranges.
And as many an ancient text will attest, there was once a Great Flood. You rained for 40 days and 40 nights, until the whole earth was blue.
And on one fine summer day you found yourself flowing down the river Jordan, as you flowed into the linen of a Jew from Nazareth who would change the world.
And on another day, a few years before you were born, you were a cloud, And a young girl studied your ever-changing face, wondering; what will my children look like?
And on another day, in complete darkness, you were floating in an amniotic sea, the temperature of blood, dreaming to the rhythm of two heartbeats.
And one day, your water as you know it will be no more.
And if you were loved, maybe you will be the tears of someone who weeps for you. Not because they're crying, but because their laughing so hard at the memory of how pathetic you looked, that time you got caught in the rain. And as they dab their cheeks, they'll stop to wonder, are you in heaven? When in fact, you've never been so near.
And one day, far from now, when this blue planet is no longer blue, you will find yourself at the center of a comet, a dirty hunk of ice tracing luminescent circles through the universe, and you will crash into a nascent world and become an ocean. Lightning will strike, and you will give rise to life. You are the rain.