I sit in a car with my parents, and we talk about how the weather is just not right this year, of how it is the beginning of May, but it has rained as if it were July already. I wake up the next day to find a message from a friend on a group chat saying it does not seem like May. I get out of bed a little while later. The usual morning routine ensues—I settle by the window, in my chair with a cup of coffee and the curtains pulled wide open. It is still raining outside as if it wasn’t enough the previous day. Not that I have anything against weather like this; in fact, I enjoy it very much, but again, my desire to have everything in its proper place gets the better of me. I let my thoughts rebel against the aesthetic of the world.
But then, it occurs to me if all of us are wrong. Out of everything I trust in this life, I trust my memory the least. There is a reason for my lists and notes and calendars that are always up to date with the minutiae of my days. I spend the better part of the morning reading up on the history of weather in the city, looking at old weather reports from years ago, countless tables and data and terms I do not understand. I go back decades, and I realise we have all been very wrong indeed. It has always been this way. We have always welcomed May with the rain.
How did we forget, then? How we forget anything. Between the bills, the exhaustion, and the want for simpler times in a world that continues to change rapidly, how can you remember anything is, perhaps, a better question to ask.
Living seems harder as the days go by and the world gets on with its antics and shenanigans. Many people I happen to talk to about the state of the world have a lot to say about it. They say it is a pattern, that things inevitably repeat, and society always moves in cycles. Some say it is the dawn of a new, complex age heralded by the advent of all this technology.
But there are others, like me, my parents, my friends, the baristas in the cafes I frequent, or the cab drivers all over town, who, when facing the insurmountable odds of living in this day and age, say, “Surely, it must be the weather.”