Lovesong
There is something heartrending about the word ‘melancholy’. Heartrending and musical and pure and beautiful. Just like rain. I don’t connect rain with melancholy as most people do. I never find anything sad about rain. But heartrending, musical, pure and beautiful? Of course it’s all of that! Yet somehow, these two words ring with almost the same frequency, within me. I cannot think of one without thinking of the other. Both are as innate to me as the colour of my eyes or the texture of my hair. I don’t even have to think – they simply occur to me. As natural as it could be. Where I live – a small peninsula at the southern end of Asia – it’s been raining day and night… for weeks at a stretch. It might be insensitive of me to say this – considering the havoc this has wreaked elsewhere, but these days have been the happiest of the year, to me. All night, I could hear the rhythmic sounds of rain – falling, falling, falling, on my gorgeous city, my vagrant city, my lost city and my