Rain, rain, clean my brain

In the middle of May, the rains began.



Until that point, the world held its breath. It pushed as far as it could under an airless environment -- began to swallow down on barren lungs.


Everything was brown. Plants were skeletons that crumbled at the touch. Even those that remained green -- banana palms, coconut, papaya -- seemed almost frozen in a vacuum that pulverised the life from us.


We flailed limply, like damp dishcloths, drinking in water by the gallon only to vaporise it almost instantly from our pores.


In Mexico, the dry season, although one of the wettest on record, was the only reality I could conceive of. It had always been dizzyingly hot. Rivers had always been dusty. I had always balanced the dry heat of the coast with an escape to the cool, pine-clad mountains forming the spine of the country.


But in the month before the rains came, I barely moved. Things stopped quietly around me, without me really noticing. Wasps lurched drunkenly from one melting pastry to another. Ice cream paused briefly in its frozen state, before giving in to the shimmery air in a sticky slide of white along the forearms. Even birdsong became lazy.


When on the coast, the only way to survive was to stay under cover. Ideas came and went, too slippery for the lazy thinker to clasp his sweaty fingers around.


The world around me and within me was pregnant. Pregnant and uncomfortable, with all the things that could be and that weren't.


Energy built up and intensified and waited; steam in a closed kettle, whistling with impatience.

My head pounded.

And then, in one day, everything changed.


I was at a petrol station at the time, on the side of the carretera running down the Pacific coast, having just crossed into Chiapas, the southernmost state. We were packed in the back of film-maker Dan's van, sulking on the bunk under the weight of the cloying air. I had stepped out for a little respite and to clean the windows. The grease on them almost obliterated the waving palms and swelling mountains taking over the landscape with heavily approaching footsteps.


I had just picked up the bucket, much to the amusement of the macho service men, who hollered and stared as I took their job from them.


Within less than a minute I was soaked to the point of dripping. Or was it flowing? Hard to say. It was more that me and the water were one and the same; I was wetter than I would have been if I had just climbed fully clothed from a pool.

The air was my sea. Around me, people fled like animals from a fire.

Dan banged on the window, urging me to get inside.

I just stared at the sky, blinking the water from my eyes and feeling the streams running down my cheeks.


This rain was to me the sweetest gift in a long stream of beautiful moments. I had waited for a long time. With it came the release of a million trapped thoughts and the relaxation of muscles turned taught by stagnant energy.


Bizarrely, I remained the only person outside on the petrol forecourt, washing the windows with soap that slid off the sodden glass in an instant, laughing at the ridiculousness of all those damp souls hiding under shelter, staring at me with confused faces.


The interest they offered me evidently discarded memories of just hours earlier, when they had all hung desperately from car windows, tongues flapping in the wind like dogs, or fleshy sails breached wide to catch the wind.

The concrete soon ran with inches of warm water that sluiced residue from roads in greasy channels.


Eventually these new rivers would find their way to fields, where earth lay waiting, imitating rocks, anticipating the day when the water would release their particles in crumbling mini-avalanches.


Under that earth lay seeds, dormant, parched. Many were dead.


But for some, the water brought life. As I jumped up and down in the Petrol Station Lake, tiny proteins started forming within them, deep below the ground. All over Mexico, seeds began to germinate.


By the time I climbed, sodden but happy, into Dan's van, laying a towel on the bunk to catch my drips, things had already started to grow.

The windows were sparkling and so was I. I watched the mountains stand straighter, like pictures of evolution from monkey to man, becoming more confident as we progressed, and yet smudged into doubt by the rivers of water that raced in diagonals down the windows.


Water dripped through holes in the roof. The bunk grew damp. The road became rapids, but the cars did not slow down.


And in my head, the thoughts that had been hanging unattached like dust for so many months began to congeal, like the earth in the fields.

Within them, awaking from the incubation of many months, things began to germinate.