I believe that nothing, albeit nothing, is concrete; especially my beliefs. Any one thing I hold to be true today may be, to me, false tomorrow. Any one person I adore today, tomorrow I may hate. Any taste, any smell, any sound I revel in right now has the potential to later make me ill.

Today, in my truest form; tapping foot, bad posture, gnawed-upon pencil sans eraser, wild hair, and unkempt clothes, I believe in rain. Rain soothes me; rain excites me. Rain cleanses me; rain coats me in mud. Above all else, rain instills throughout my being a feeling of warmth.

My dad died in a car accident when I was four, so at age six I knew two things to be fact: one was that my dad was in heaven, and the other was that angels take people to heaven in cars. At that age, more than anything in the world I wanted my family to be a whole unit again. I missed my dad, and I was sad for me, but I hated, hate, to see my mom cry. And when my mom cried, my baby brother cried, and if I hadn’t already, I started in after him. I quickly developed a keen hatred for the taste of tears and the smell of Kleenex.
The only solution I could come up with to put a stop to these cry fests was for all of us, together and at the same time, to take a car to heaven, to dad.

One night, my mom was driving my brother and I home from a birthday party. I was in the front seat, my brother was in his car seat in the back, and the rain was cascading down in vicious, impenetrable sheets of water, berating our windshield and obscuring my mother’s vision.

At first she didn’t feel as though the rain impaired her driving enough to suffice pulling the car over and waiting for the storm to pass. After a near-collision with a fallen tree, however, she succumbed to the storms greater power. The shoulder she chose to pull over onto was on the opposite side of the road, and placed at the beginning of a particularly hairy turn. After a couple songs had come and gone on the radio, a bright pair of headlights penetrated the thickness of the night, and a large tractor-trailer came into view. The rain, the night, and the unique placement of the shoulder all impressed upon me the illusion that the truck was going to hit us.

Coming to the realization that we three were going to die there, together, instilled in me the feeling of warmth I described previously. I laid my head on my mom’s shoulder, patted her hand reassuringly, and closed my eyes. The headlights grew brighter and brighter behind my eyelids, my heart rate increased ten-fold and I probably peed my pants a little bit; but I remained warm. And then they were gone.

Rain always has, and I believe always will, give me that feeling of warmth. I know the only other time I’ll feel it is in the moment before I die, and that is a comforting assurance.