Rain
We carry this cartoon picture of rain pouring down out of clouds, as though the clouds contain the rain, as though they store it, as though the clouds are the buckets that hold all this water in the sky. But there are no buckets. The rain does not pour down out of the clouds because the rain is the clouds.
I am writing these words beneath a torrent. I am in the top floor of my house hearing the hard rain pour onto the roof over my head. Before this rain is done, certainly enough will have fallen over this part of the city to fill a pool or a pond or more, maybe the inlet of a little lake. I know I will be able to see as much in the way the river near me rises. Yet all that water up above had no watertight walls to hold it there, no tank. It was in the air above our heads. All that weight was up there, uncontained, suspended within the strangest state of matter, vapor. Somehow—and I defy anyone to imagine this—the microspheres of water (not “droplets,” since they did not yet drop) were spread out so tiny and thin that just the air was enough to keep them from falling, even though all that matter was nevertheless so substantial and real that we could see it as pods of white masses traversing the sky.
The clouds failed. That is what the rain is, that is what the torrent is: the clouds failing, the clouds ending, the clouds losing the fiction of their seemingly impossible state. During a rain, clouds are not really in the sky, or they are not there for long, because the clouds are falling. Cold collapses them. The colder air, a shock of truth, disinflates the hopeful microspheres. They congeal, seeking and clinging to one another, becoming droplets, condensing. They plummet. The process is the same as dew forming, except with the crisis of so much water in the sky and no blades of grass to catch the condensate. There is so much water up there, with no buckets, that the rate of condensing, second by second, is enough to produce a continuous cascade. The torrent goes on until (A) warm air returns to keep some of the remaining vapor aloft or (B) the clouds come all the way down.
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