It baffles me how we see after the storm. The sheer clarity excites me—how we notice when the gales stop blowing, when the sun breaks, when the dust finally settles, and the rain turns to harmless pellets of water until it all finally stops. Then, almost compulsively, we look at the sky. Then, compulsively still, we tell another person the rain has stopped. It rarely plays out differently. Nobody asks, but something inside us urges us to tell them it is over. It has stopped raining, and we are safe again. When all is said and done, it is often said repeatedly to anyone you meet. I reckon it’s the most important thing to tell your fellow people—we are safe now.
As they often join you to look at the sky, you stand together in awe of what’s left after the blue-grey haze of the storm lifts. It was irrelevant how observant one was or how wise; no one saw clearly in a storm. As proud of our intelligence as we were, we were forgetful creatures. A few days of overcast skies, and we forgot how the sun felt. All we had was memory, but memory was tricky and rarely matched the real thing. The little, childlike peek through the curtain after days of torrential rains was how we recorded our blue skies. The colour surging with an odd sense of security could never match the general days. And so, we had to look again every time it stopped raining.
A few days of inclement weather made us grateful for a cup of coffee; an unintended walk on a rainy day made us understand the importance of our regular, dry clothing. It was only at the tip of imminent doom that we could recall how good it all was, and then, we wished if we could only get it once again. It happened over and over, almost as if a cycle of life. No one learned their way around it. We were forgetful creatures—we forgot both our blessings and our curses in the blink of an eye. While getting used to pain was possible, it was much easier to get used to happiness.
The sky was often the most forgotten thing in the world. No one could describe it to you in detail until it was lost, even if temporarily, and most storms were an act of tough love—trying to teach us a lesson we could never learn.