I have always associated rain with reality, as if the truth came to me in the form of heavenly tears. That summer afternoon as I sat alone on the porch listening to the thunder, the association was even sharper than usual.

The mailman had come minutes before, dripping wet and disgruntled. Who could blame him? Snail mail is mostly junk, yet he must still travel through the worst weather to deliver it. And the one letter that I wanted didn’t come, the same way it hadn’t come for innumerable months; so I walked into the rain.

One word whipped down the dark alleyways of my mind like a whirlwind: descalza. Barefoot in Spanish. As I stepped sorrowfully into the puddles, it grew stronger and banished all other thoughts. Descalza. Descalza. Descalza. But even the mailman wore shoes. Even the sad mailman, and I was the only one barefoot in the rain, the only one actually standing in the puddles, absorbing the reality that the letter wouldn’t come, that the mailman would trudge home to his family, that I would catch a cold from reality.