Lately, my mantra has been “Just rain already” on a number of different days.

For one, I truly enjoy rain. Hard thunderstorming rain that feels like pebbles exploding on your shoulders. Plump, ponderous drops the size of softballs that drench you almost instantly. Mist that chaps your skin, but gives you that dank basement feeling when you strip off your clothes and climb into a dry bed. Rain can make my day.

Plus, when it’s raining, I feel like I’m in a worldwide sensory deprivation tank. Driving in the rain with no music you can’t hear anything but the dull thumps of drops on the roof and windshield. Outside, the colors of the world are muted in the sun’s absence and even the smell of the air is one pallatable constant. Meditation on days like that just happens naturally.

But, when it hasn’t started raining, the pressure systems the preceding weather produces cause such unreasonable pain in my sinuses that I have difficulty enjoying the downpour when it breaks. As my mind is immersed in such things, I sometimes consider it my superpower, being hypersensitive to changes in meteorological patterns; however, it’s the dumbest superpower ever.

Not simply because it causes pain. I could live with limited precognition at the cost of migraines. No, it is a stupid power because the pain it causes only reminds me how I am mortal and at the whim of the world. I feel almost like Cassandra, powerless to change the future of which I am so urgently aware.

“Just rain already…”