GUEST POST by Ianculescu: Each Drop of Rain Has Its Own Story

TODAY I SAW PEOPLE

I was once ice, but the Sun god blessed me with warmth. So I was reborn into a mountain lake. I grew up there interacting with others like myself and other creatures of the water. Many say that I am the source of life on Earth, but I am still not convinced that this is so. I did nothing special to be what I am and I really can accomplish nothing that might change that. Nature is my mistress and of those others like myself. She decides how long and how I will live. I like to think that I, like everyone else, am only a small cog, part of the great machinery of life. I, like you, have aspirations, desires and feelings. I’m happy when I meet someone who thinks like I do, or suffers when they lose a loved one. I had never met people until today. Today Nature showed me the world.

I evaporated. I left the body in which I had been accustomed to live. I left the lake behind, with the promise that in the distant future I will have the chance to reunite with my loved ones, if not in the same place I grew up in another ever more so beautiful. I do not remember much of my journey to heaven. Burned by the Sun god, I felt that this journey of disintegration the elders call Rebirth is nothing else than simple death. The long and painful journey transported me to a place that I had previously imagined to be totally different. The old tales spoke about it with fascination, which is why my previous image of it was fairytale like. I had been wrong, because where I arrived evaporated was more akin a battlefield, nothing enchanting about it. I recomposed myself.

There, above all, a bitter struggle for survival goes on. I was part of a rain cloud. Amazingly, there are no friends and no holds barred. Everything is gray. I did not recognize anyone and I got the impression that no one knows anyone. I acquired a new body that became colder or warmer independently of my will. Nature remodeled me for combat, it seems. Although I could not adjust my temperature, I had regained full freedom of movement. I learned that I can increase or minimize my size with amazing speed, but without discovering what could be the use of it. The fact is that that place still haunts me. I had no time to think about what was happening to me. The environment became increasingly darker, noisier, worse. My peers were dying bumped of by stronger ones. Wherever I looked I saw drops dancing in a gruesome battle. I accepted my fate, I let my guard down feeling that this for me is the end. And then everything went white.

A bang that made ​​me vibrate woke me up. Now I am falling, I’m spinning very fast. I am falling without being able to see my way. I’m not dead, it seems. I cannot take control, I cannot move, I can do nothing. I think I fainted when the white sea embraced the cloud which had become my new home. In a way I’m glad I broke out of it. But at what price? If I had stayed there, I would have died; I escaped and now I am heading at great speed towards nowhere. I am falling uncontrollably, piercing clouds of different colors. I am glad though that I regained my liquid body, but this is but a meager consolation. My end will find me in my rightful body which is howerver slowly failing. I look behind me with great effort and observe terrified that little pieces of me are left behind. I am fall apart, I am almost frozen and I cannot do anything about it. It may have been better to have chosen to remain in the cloud and to die like a proud warrior; not a coward, running away.

Wonder. I came out of the cloud and began to warm up. Although I am falingl at the same speed I fail to control, a sense of well being is flooding my senses. I might yet come out of this alive. I get to see the curve of the horizon, so the Earth is really curved. I begin to recognize the green of the trees, I begin to recognize the irregular forms of the lakes, I see huge gray snakes streaked with white, interrupted stripes on which other creatures of different colors are moving. I see moving rivers, I see huge ossified spiders, I see ants moving to and fro, I see weird, inert trees, I see life. That gives me strength. As the earth becomes more visible, I realize that the snakes are actually roads, the spiders are electric wires, the ants are … well, humans. Some are hidden under some colored mushrooms which are protecting them from the rain, others have other coverings on their heads. I manage to forcefully steer my landing on the nose of one without a protecting mushroom. I do not linger more than a few seconds that I am flicked away in a small puddle. Almost immediately someone steps on me. How will I ever find my way home?

by Razvan Ianculescu, 03/25/2914