Precipitation
It has been raining all year.
We wake up on January 1st to a full-blown thunderstorm. It begins raining at six in the morning, sheets and sheets of opaque rain coming down, flooding corners of Singapore and nudging us back into bed, making blanket burritos of us all. The second time I wake, it’s almost noon, and still raining. I burrow further into my blankets and check my phone. Plans are being rearranged, early morning hikes and running groups folding up their new-year optimism and pocketing it for later, and the cat, spooked by thunder, uncharacteristically crawls into bed with me, her ears flattening. I had big plans for the first day of 2021, ready to bid good riddance to the awful remains of 2020 with a killer combination of productivity: reading, writing, cleaning, exercise. I do none of those things. The relentless rain makes it obscene to even consider real life. My sister comes into my room, yawning, and curls up with the cat and me. Like this, we drift, content, into the first moments of the year.
It is still raining when we finally roll out of bed in search of food. As we chomp on pork buns, we watch the sky wring itself over and over. How much water can the sky hold? We are about to find out. All night, the rain phases from thunderstorm to drizzle, occasionally moving into a fine, damp mist, before resuming the torrential pour. I go to my best friend’s house and wrap myself in their blanket, watching reruns of the death-game dystopian series Alice in Borderland while sipping on cheap drugstore wine. In between episodes, we compare notes: I’ve been upright for less than two hours today; he’s slightly more successful, having at least driven to the office to collect something. In a show of remarkable self-discipline, our girlfriend manages a pilates class, but can’t bring herself to do much more, flopping sideways on the bed immediately after, mumbling about the rain. All over the country, our friends report similar agendas in various group chats: a slow, lazy afternoon, spent napping and marveling at the sky, putting off till tomorrow what suddenly seems unnecessary to do today.
You must understand, this rain is ridiculous. In the second half of 2020, Singapore saw an unusual number of flash floods, massively apocalyptic rain clouds, and altogether cooler weathers, but the last few days of the year were unbearably humid. Sitting just off the equator, Singaporean seasons are essentially hot and hotter, any meteorological changes often reflected in the abrasiveness of the people, spikes in road rage, and public discourtesy. The rain, although a derailer of plans, brings with it temporarily calmer moods. Coinciding with the start of the new year, the flood of newly canceled plans that might frustrate us normally seems cast with divine intervention. We stretch, slump over cushions, and watch the sky.
I kind of love it, my girlfriend says, curling up against my thigh. It’s two in the morning, and we are lying on the couch, watching the rain beat down on the windowpanes. I know it sounds new agey and silly, but it feels like the world is washing away the bad juju of 2020. When we wake on January 2nd, nothing has changed. The world is still rinsing itself out, scrubbing dirt from the topmost layer of our soil cover, our drains swirling with milk-tea-colored runoff. It’s the first long weekend of the year, the calendar conspiring with the weather to legitimize the pushing off of plans. News reports start flowering from all corners of the Internet, predicting flooding in certain areas of the country, the lowest recorded temperature of the day being 21.5 degrees celsius, a miracle for those of us who’d grown up with temperatures averaging close to 30. Southeast Asia is in la niña, seeing more rainfall than normal across the region, and we are all waiting to see if we will break our 2011 standing record for highest daily rainfall. The forecast rolls in: thunderstorms for the rest of the week, possibly beyond.
The sky is crying, my friend texts, but somehow it feels like these are tears of catharsis.
Already I am thinking of this strange lull, in between the calendar start of the year and when real life truly begins, with a grateful nostalgia. Surely, as work resumes and offices reopen, as the sun breaks through and the clouds recede, the grind of life will slowly pick up again, tensions accumulating between our shoulder blades as we firefight whatever crisis comes our way. But for now, in these brief moments in the eye of the storm, life has offered us respite after an excruciating year. In this oasis of peace, the new year begins. This is the first break I’ve taken, my best friend says, in what feels like forever. I feel good. I glance over at him, leaning back against his pillow, his face unknotted and tranquil. His expression reflecting my own. It isn’t optimism, or anticipation for the year to come. It’s an unbothered, serene dwelling in the present, a saturated sense of well-being. Our eyes meet, and I smile. You look good, I say.
