Rain Doesn't Ask Who It Buried

Everyone talks about rain

like it’s a fucking lullaby —

as if water falling from a fractured sky

was ever a metaphor for healing.

It’s not.

It’s a warning.

It’s relapse in slow motion.

It’s every goddamn memory

crawling out from under the floorboards

because the flood flushed shame loose.

You hear petrichor.

I hear mold

on walls no one fixed

because some things — like fathers and governments —

prefer to rot in silence.

Rain was never poetry in my house.

It was wet socks.

Damp mattresses.

Leaky tin roofs where we placed buckets

not for drinking water

but to catch the trauma

before it reached our throats.

Some kids splashed in puddles.

I walked around them

like landmines filled with my own past.

The only thunder I knew

was the one that followed

drunken voices and slammed doors.

And lightning?

Just God reminding us

we were never off His kill list.

You write poems about chai and cuddles.

I remember peeling skin off my soles

after days of dampness

because umbrellas are luxuries

and childhood was a monsoon

with no drainage.

You romanticize rainfall

like it’s love returning.

But for some of us,

the sky coming back

means the graves forgot to stay buried.

You say it smells like earth.

I say it smells like the childhood

I tried to suffocate

under layers of deodorized adulthood.

You say the rain is sacred.

I say it's a repeat offender

in a clean suit —

the kind that makes you think

“maybe this time,

it won’t hurt.”

But it always does.

It drips into the crevices of memory

like a stalker

who knows which days you stopped crying,

and comes back

to make sure you never forget

why you started.

It doesn’t heal.

It doesn’t soothe.

It floods everything you didn’t plan to feel.

Rain doesn’t whisper.

It doesn’t cradle.

It crashes through ceilings

and asks if you still remember

how your mother used to pretend

the leaks were part of the design.

Rain doesn’t inspire me.

It interrogates me.

And you —

you who write love poems

about monsoon kisses

and chai-fueled nostalgia —

you’ve clearly never had to boil water

because the rain drowned your stove.

You’ve never watched a sibling cough blood

while the damp settled in their lungs

and your house pretended it was still a home.

You don’t write poems like this

when rain is background noise.

You write poems like this

when rain becomes the god

you were told to worship

because no one told you

it was the same god

that watched you drown.

So don’t talk to me about rain

unless it’s under a leaking ceiling

with no light, no electricity,

no escape.

Don’t write me metaphors

about aching skies

unless your pain

ever dripped from a place

you were too poor to fix.

Rain isn’t soft.

Rain is ancestral grief.

Rain is a truth serum

for the lies you learned to call memory.

Rain doesn’t ask who it buried.

It just returns every year

to dig them back up

in case you forgot

what it means

to never be dry again.