The Cartography of Rain

The storm draws maps on windows— rivulets tracing continents that never were, pooling into archipelagos of temporary glass.

I watch a single drop merge with the whole, its edges dissolving like an old photograph, and think of how we vanish into what we join, how rain remembers being ocean before it fell as questions.

The gutters sing their guttering song, a language older than words, telling of depths and drownings and the strange grace of returning— how every cloud was once a sea, how every ending begins again in mist.