Relics of Afternoons Past

As it goes, there was a time when I was terribly afraid of rain at 2:30 in the afternoon during the summers of my childhood. I would wake up at that very moment from the noontime nap requisite to growing children, as my mother (via the then nanny) would have me do, and find the world absolutely changed from what it was in the glaring morning. The sala wherein I slept would be emptied of my companions of the earlier hours, replaced by watching shadows whose eyes seemed to be the window and the door left open, as if one missed the goodbyes of a leaving guest, only to realize the minute after they do that they really are gone. It was supposedly summer, but then I would wonder where summer had gone in the absence of its sunshine. Outside was a sky pregnant with lead and rain, brooding and muttering bass complaints above deserted streets, whipped-silent houses, and desolate children. It cried as it gave birth, and one would cry with her, hoping that the noise one made would drown out the former--drown it first before it drowns you, and oh, how it drowns you, that thunder of rain falling on echoing pavements and cheap tin rooftops and the hollows of your chest when you know you've been abandoned.

I remember crying in a way that seemed more like screaming, because the sadness wasn't much like itself but more like fear. I would be screaming for an hour or so before my nanny would come and snap at my pointless crying. Whoever cries during the rain, anyhow? Rain was simply water falling, she said.

If only rain was just that.

She was the kinder one, her. The crying-screaming took too much air, and I hiccoughed when it was too much, so she gave me water to stop the hiccoughs, and would console me with some afternoon snack, like chocolate rice pudding or fried plantains. And I would forget that I had been afraid, until the next afternoon.

Strange that I should recall it now. There is nothing about this noon that ought to have reminded me of it. No shadows, no rain.

It would take several summers more to outgrow the rain, and years more to outgrow abandonment. To be precise, twenty years and one knight to outgrow abandonment.