Echoes in the Rain: You Can Only Get As Wet As Your Skin

A grey day, followed by a dark night. There was no sunshine here. It was like the sun forgot to extend its rays to this damp place. It was always gloomy and unwelcoming. Nobody smiled and said “hey.”

I wish I had known about this place, but in my haste to run away, I had picked the furthest I could travel with the money I had saved.

I ended up here. The land of no smiles and incessant rain.

I had been walking for hours. Away from them. The rich b*****d who were sitting in their warm house in front of a wood fire. I could see their smug faces as I was forced to leave and not come back until after midnight.

A young girl walking the streets in the dark.

Every night.

What could possibly go wrong?

I had no money. I didn’t know a soul. I was far from home. Where do you go if you have nothing?

I was unwanted. I had always been unwanted. First my family, and now them.

I walked anywhere I could think of, without ending up someplace. It was hard to keep walking without actually ending up somewhere. I kept having to turn around until I learned the layout of the city. The places to avoid if I wanted to live. Took me a few months, but I had come from a much worse place.

I was not going home. Never.

Nobody was going to break me.

I never knew it could rain like this without it being a shower. It never stopped for days on end, torrential like the monsoon season in India that I had seen on TV. This place was far from India. As the months rolled by, the damp cold permeated everything.

Tufts of wet strands of hair covered my ears and stuck to my neck like cold spaghetti, dripping cold water into crevices of my body until every inch and follicle of me was soaked.

I heard my Nan’s voice, “ You can only get as wet as your skin.”

Yeah, that’s warm rain. Not like this. Never like this. I thought to myself as I trod in a deep puddle, and an unpleasant, icy, wet shock entered my left foot with a slosh.

How I missed her and wished she could be here and give me some of her wisdom. I sure could use some of it right about now.

My jeans stuck to me like limp broccoli, with the occasional breeze catching my shins with icy determination. My T-shirt and sweater clung to me like limpets to a stone. Even my shoes squeaked when the rain soaked my soles in the puddles that formed everywhere.

What on earth was I doing in this place? How did I get here?

“Anywhere is better than going back home,” I mumbled. I kept saying it to myself through chattering teeth like a mantra. No matter how much I tried to think about the warm summers of home, my body refused to comprehend what it felt like.

How long had I been walking?

My stomach rumbled, but I didn’t have enough change for food.

How long had it been since my last meal? Two days? I couldn’t remember.

I looked up into the black sky. Rain pelting my face in earnest like tiny wet missiles striking my nose and cheeks. It hurt. Rain shouldn’t hurt, should it? I didn’t know. I had never experienced rain like this before I came here.

A car went by, drenching my lower legs. The third soaking today. I shivered as I watched the tail lights disappear around the corner. “Yeah, you just keep on driving as if I’m invisible, you dumb piece of s**t.”

No one sees the drenched girl.

Some day, I will be somebody. I won’t need to walk in the rain to stay away. Some day I will be wanted by people. Not thrown out like yesterday’s trash in a container.

Some day.

— — — — — — — —

My name is Lizzy. I’m a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.

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