Raindrop

I have a job that never ends, but I don’t complain because I get to see many places around the world and I always travel with company. Although I live in an endlessly repetitive cycle, two events helped me not get bored of this eternal routine.

One day, after having evaporated, The Wind pushed me towards a desert in Africa. We are uncomfortable going to these places because sometimes we go through the entire condensation process to not even touch the ground before evaporating again. There, we seldom form clouds. Regardless, my next destination and that of my traveling companions seemed to be very clear.

My molecules were getting closer, and gravity was starting to call me with increasing intensity. I would lose my floating ability at any moment.

From here, the view is limitless: a panoramic photograph is not wide enough to capture what I can see. Below, what awaited us this time, was a surface of a unicolor-dried brown, interrupted by cracks. I also observed a crowd of people who, from my perspective, looked like groups of moving dots. Surely none of us had been there in a long, long time.

When the precipitation started, I got excited. I always get excited before free fall.

As I approached the ground, I felt the people staring at us. It seemed to me that we were accelerating beyond gravity as if their anxiety was pulling us faster.

Following the excitement of the fall comes a moment of fear. Although I have already been through this countless times, and I know we do not have nerve endings like humans, so we don’t feel pain, crashing into the Planet continues to generate uncertainty in me.

I found myself directly against the aridity. When I crashed and left a little cloud of dust behind me, I immediately saw how I spread and penetrated the dirt that sucked me in like a vacuum cleaner. If my companions and I had been frozen and extracted from that labyrinth of porosities, we would look like a highly branched bonsai tree.

With so much dryness, I thought I would not escape for a long time, but many more companions arrived, and soon we saturated the soil, returning to the fluidity that characterizes us.

The local people seemed crazy with such a high level of joy that they couldn’t stop laughing and dancing. They even put on mud makeup. They did it in our honor, for the relief that our arrival brought them.

Most of the time, people complain about the rain or the snow. Our presence enchants only a few, seen as strange by their peers. In contrast, seeing so many people celebrating made us remember this day as something special.

The party didn’t last long. The sun broke through the clouds and The Wind helped move them. I had been part of an instant stream, and fortunately, I did not have to go through the digestive process of animals that drank millions of us. And, although in the end, we free ourselves, some of us lose our identity in that process. I was lucky and remained free until we couldn’t continue moving forward and the heat did its job. Eventually, we evaporated.

Once back in the sky, we floated in our dispersed form to another town. There, they surely shared the same needs as in the previous one. Only these people must have been even more desperate: the new generation had never seen us.

They extracted water from deep wells or looked for it in populated centers many kilometers away. At least that’s what I heard from some colleagues who had been there years ago.

When the time came, the opportunity to explore down there presented itself again. This time I had expectations and questions: Would these people be as grateful as the previous ones? Would I feel their longing? Would the ground absorb me so aggressively? I would soon find out.

As I fell, they didn’t seem to be particularly excited; it was as if they didn’t care or didn’t believe what was happening; perhaps our prolonged absence had dashed their hopes. However, I noticed that the little ones were staring at the gray clouds, and then at us. On the one hand, there was disbelief and, on the other, astonishment.

It was still too high to know where I would land. I was going down in a straight vertical line expecting a crash like last time, but The Wind appeared and made us fall obliquely, pointing towards the people.

I wanted to back out when I calculated where I would end up, but honestly, I have never controlled my movements, so I resigned myself.

I made contact on a smooth surface and began to slide, then split in two. I, who had always remained within my area of ​​existence, was now divided, discontinuous. It was strange. Then I understood everything.

I had fallen on the face of a toddler who could barely walk. When I made contact with his cheek, he inhaled short and fast. He raised his eyelids so high that I didn’t think it was possible, and he remained still for a moment. I guessed he had never felt or seen a raindrop or a cold tear. He touched his face and stared at his hand, which shone like when he wiped water spilled from his eyes. In no time, he had it soaked. Many of us slid on him. Although it didn’t take me long to reach the ground, I could sense that the joy of discovery was overwhelming him. He laughed, exposing the four teeth that had emerged so far. Fascination led him to collect many of my companions. With his hands cupped, he ran as fast as his funny steps allowed him to show his mother the news.

After these two visits to the ground, the following rains were not the same for me, or perhaps less the same as before.