Rain-inspired

Rain-inspired1

She loved it when it rained, especially at night. She would sit, wrapped in her blanket with a pen in her hand and write down fiction and reality, blended and sometimes separate. She would create a world of her own in which she could control what would happen. Always, she wrote from the 1st person perspective. She felt the power in her hand as she made her characters happy or changed their lives in a single moment. It was under the music of the rain as it hit the roof, the ground and the leaves that she allowed herself to enter that world of lives easy-to-control.2

That night, the rain opened a different door into a different world. It seemed as though the sky was weeping. She never felt that sad before... that afraid. As she held the pen in her hand, she could see it shaking. The rain drops seemed to be humongous and for a second she thought that such rain can easily break through the roof and destroy everything. She chased the thought away. She seized the pen even more strongly and put it on the white paper. 3

She drew a dot – her birth. Then she drew a short line – her childhood. Then she stopped. It was the day she had to decide whether to stay with her mother or her father; a tough decision that she had no choice but to make. That was the first real crossroad that she met in her life. She drew two short lines emerging from her childhood – one for the teenage years she could have had with her father and one for the teenage years she passed with her mother. Then from end of her teenage years with her mother, she drew three other lines when she had to choose between universities. Her pen went on and on drawing the line of her life. Choices and decisions made. She drew on and on. When she reached the end of the paper she took another one, put them together and drew on. She drew until her pen stopped at the moment when she was sitting there in the warm living room that very night. 4

She put the papers on the floor and looked at the lines. For the first time, she looked at all what had happened to her. Under the music of the rain, violent no more, she sat and looked at her life. She could see those moments she regretted deeply and the moments she made the wrong choice. She looked at the “crossroads” she had in life. So many… What could have happened if she made the other choice? What could have happened if she stayed with her father? Other university? Other husband? She felt small, seeing how powerful life was. She felt small knowing that all those crossroads could have resulted in wholly different lives. She wanted to feel small… because she realized that her life, just like the life of the characters she created in her stories, was in her own hands.5