At night when it rains the only lights are from buildings and streetlights and cars, there is no moon, no stars. The artificial lights streak on the black slick roads, long reflective colorful illuminations that dance and shimmer and splash with the passage of vehicles, green and yellow and red stoplights, brakelights, turn signals, hot pink and neon blue and orange and lush purple.

The rain drops falling on the window are little prisms washed away by rhythmic wipers. These droplets of color puddle and pool in the gutters and the ruts of the road, grooves worn from the passage of cars and trucks and buses, and the myriad of lights reflect like the polarized negative of burned rubber streaks behind the black tires.

The rain the rain the rain always the rain falls, it never not falls. Black clouds, lavender, violet, indigo, silver, luminous, opaque, grey, pink, orange, gold clouds, the sun breaks and shines for five minutes, look the trees have shadows, and still it rains but there are as many different kinds of rain as there are color clouds. Always but in different directions, with different subtle nuances, heavy or light, big drops small spit sheets cats dogs, all the colloquialisms unfit for description of water, devoid of any sense of sound. Hammers and nails.

It's raining still and again, and I think of the rain in terms of music notation, crescendo allegro fortissimo, Latinate descriptions of sound dropping down the sides of the sky. I can hear it pummel the roof, dull roar constant and it makes me think of sad people’s souls, those too unhappy to stop being unhappy. I want to take them outside and stand in the drenching downpour, blink away the raindrops, feel it seep into hair and slip down brow and tilt chin up to heaven and watch the rivulets roll off fingertips, until all the false memories and all the sorrow and all the problems and all the pain is washed away.