You stand in the rain, feeling the soft, wet drops fall on your skin.

They feel like silk, like satin and exotic things.

They smell like new things, like moist earth and fresh flowers, wet dog and freshly mown grass.

They collect the scents and flavors of the life around them, at once having the personality of everything and nothing.

Water is soft, water is hard. It is life-giving and life-taking.

It softly caresses your skin with the tender touch of a lover one moment, and pricks you with a thousand hot, driving needles the next as the wind blows the fine, countless droplets horizontal.

It nips and soothes, bites and licks, causing both simple pleasure and simple pain.

It slides over your skin, touching each fine, minute hair, leaving moist trails in its wake, trails that speak of mystery and simplicity, trails that dry from a slippery silk to a sticky satin, and then vanish into nothingness.

Rain has a flavor, you know...it tastes like air, like clouds, the faint mineral freshness plipping and plopping on your softly closed eyes as you try to catch a single drop on your tongue.

It vanishes before you can even comprehend it, but you know it was there.

Rain is simple, but complicated. Sensual, but painful. Indefinable, but perfectly defined. Molding and changing everything in its path, even you. Rain is life itself.