Almost-rain of an unremarkable fountain

It was not the sort of place one expected to be altered by. A garden, yes, but familiar, arranged and tended, its paths obedient, its beauty almost rehearsed. Nothing in it suggested rupture, nothing there promised the undoing of the self.

At its center, there was a fountain. It wasn't magnificent or even aspiring to be. It rose and fell with insistence. The water did not crash or proclaim; it returned to itself again and again, the same height each time, the same return. One could have passed it a hundred times and carried nothing away.

I stepped into its nearness, into the delicate circumference where water turned to air before it remembered its descent. There, the body met something nameless. It was neither rain nor mist. It felt like an interval, a hesitation of water, a soft insistence against the skin.

Closer to the ground than sky, almost carelessly tethered to the fountain's silent labour, was the rainbow. It appeared without announcement and dissolved without regret. No one seemed to stop for it.

I stood there within reach of both, the faint touch of water and that brief arc of colour, and felt something within me falter. What faltered was smaller than a realization. It was an unbidden unfastening.

The mind, with all its restless inventory, its grievances, its small, persistent aches, seemed, for a moment, to loosen its grip. The droplets were interrupted. They entered without permission, without narrative, and, in doing so, made the weight of thought suddenly excessive.

It was then that I understood how much of living is endured through accumulation, how we carry ourselves as sediment, each moment settling upon the next, until even our lightness feels earned rather than inherent. And here was water, indifferent, unburdened, touching the body without memory.

There was a scent in the air, madhumalti (Chinese honeysuckle) perhaps. It existed the way certain truths do: fully and without demand. And standing there, in the persistence of water, the patience of scent, I felt an unfamiliar dislocation. As though the self I had been rehearsing was not as inevitable as I had believed.

It is unsettling to find oneself less fixed than one appears to be. That beneath the constant articulation of identity, there is something far less adorned, far less certain, and yet, strangely, more at ease.

The fountain did not notice me, of course. Untouched by the presence of a witness, it continued its small cycle of rising and falling.

And perhaps that is what stayed with me the most, the recognition that there are moments, ungoverned, in which the self loosens its hold on itself; moments in which one is no longer performing the weight of being.

And in that brief suspension, standing in the almost-rain of an unremarkable fountain, I encountered something I cannot fully recover from, only remember as a thinning, a lightness not given, but revealed.

As if, for an instant, I had stepped outside the habit of myself and found nothing waiting there, and felt, inexplicably, relieved.

Love,

Charvee A Pandya