I feel it in my bones.
The rain that hasn’t come.
It doesn’t make sense but it’s true. I wake up at 2am and my hands ache and throb. I can feel my pulse in my feet. My wedding ring is too tight and slide my fingers under my pillow to unclench my fists.
It’s going to rain, I say. Like strange atmospheres building up inside me. A storm of tiny fractures inside my bones. My husband makes a half-awake noise of sympathy.
I used to think it was all in my head. An old wives’ tale. You can’t predict the weather with bones, I’d say. But my skeleton says other things.
I take two aspirin and get back into bed. My head is too full of clouds. My face burns and my hands hold a fever that cracks like firewood.
It’s going to rain, I say to my hands to my feet. It’s going to rain and then this will pass. An hour goes by and the pain moves to my legs. I want to run and stretch the pain away. I want to wrap my fragile bones in soft white tissue, like delicate China cups. I want my mother to stroke my hair and say, It’s just growing pains, like she did those years when I grew too quickly.
Then I hear it. The muffled, uneven tapping. The slow but insistent beating on the metal roof. The gentle pinging noise of the early morning rain cooling the warm metal.
I reach out to press my hand to window. It’s cold, and the coolness is a relief.
It’s raining, I sigh. It’s a relief in more ways than you can imagine. My swollen parts will return to normal soon. The damn has broken. The worry of feeling insane passes a little. Not entirely though. Because who can hold rain in their bones? Rain that hasn’t even come? I know who. The same person who holds fog in her head. Who is come undone by the pull of full moons. Who is far too sensitive to the strange whims of a body and mind that listen too much to the world.
In some ways it’s a relief to feel the pain of coming rains. It assures me that the storms in my head are real too. And that they will, as well, pass in time. I wonder if there’s a weather pattern for depression? A barometric pressure for anxiety? A bad wind for sleeplessness and fear? I wonder why I’m so much rain in bones, and fog in thought. I wonder why distant hurricanes scream inside me and why sometimes the air grows thick and too heavy, leaving me a stranded sailing ship on a too-still sea for as long as the depression settles.
I move my other hand to the window. The heat creates an aura that surrounds it, as if I can finally see the invisible parts of me that stretch beyond the boundary of my skin. It’s raining, I whisper.
How do you do that? he asks sleepily. How do you always know?
It’s easy, I say. Although “easy” is not the right word.
I feel it in my bones.