Those under the rain

There are those who love in countries where the sky never finishes weeping, where the rain is not rain but a slow confession the clouds make to the earth, and the earth receives it all without complaint, green and wounded and open. They walk along the strand at evening when the Atlantic turns the colour of slate, and the wind pulls at their coats like a question no one wants to answer, and the gulls cry out as if remembering something they were never told. Those who love here learn early that the fog is not an enemy but a kind of mercy, it softens the edges of things that would otherwise cut, the church spire, the harbour wall, the distance between two bodies standing close. They carry their longing the way the boglands carry water, quietly, deeply, in a darkness that feeds the roots of everything that blooms. And they know that tenderness is not the absence of sorrow but sorrow’s other name, the one it whispers when It thinks no one else is listening. Sometimes the light breaks through.. not triumphant, not golden, but silver and uncertain, the way a hand reaches across a table without knowing if it will be held. And in that brief fracture between one grey hour and the next, the whole of Connemara exhales, and the furze remembers how to be yellow, and the lovers pause, stunned by the ordinary violence of beauty. Those who love under Irish rain do not ask for permanence. They know the mist will return, that the evenings will thicken again like grief, that the sea will keep its habit of erasing whatever is written on the shore. But still they write. Still they stand at the edge of the water with their pockets full of unsent letters and their mouths full of almost, and they call that stubborn, trembling, rain-soaked almost the closest thing to faith they have ever known.