In the crisp early-autumn gust that breaks through my soft-knit sweater and the occasional drizzle that drips at the edge of my bag and boots, I laugh uncontrollably at the way my thick curly hair, barely tied, stretches in every direction, and how my umbrella firmly bends inside out. Thankfully there’s the red stoplight to keep me at my pace.
I have always been so fascinated with downpours, having lived most of my life in a country frequented by storms. For as cold and dangerous as they are, they’ve almost always ensured we’d find some shelter.
When the monsoon caught us in school, we’d immediately be asked to go to where the school buses were parked and fetched by our conductors, so we could be sent right back home.
When classes were suspended and there was nothing to do in the next twenty-four hours, I’d find amusement going to my parents’ bedroom to watch the spread out leaves of our backyard Fortune Trees, the waterfalls forming along our neighbour’s hollow block walls, and the flying scraps of metal roofs or wooden sari-sari store signs. It felt safe and comfortable having fully-shut glass windows and a room in no need of fans or air conditioner amidst the cool weather. And my mother, who was always at home, would prepare our bags and remind us never to leave our umbrellas behind, and my father—if he didn’t have work those days—would rise early to cook warm sopas.
But as I grew older, I realized shelter doesn’t always come grandly. Sometimes it came through the simple gesture of sharing umbrellas on the way back home. Upon reaching college and growing intimate with my dearest friend, it became our tradition: to walk under the same roof in the final hour of togetherness, then for me to lend him my umbrella in hopes he doesn’t get wet upon our parting, even if it meant I did. For he walked and I took the bus to get home. So I’d gamble and pray, every time it rains, for the rain to subside the moment I get off the bus. And I’d pray it rained again in the near future so we could continue this shared act. And before it did again, I’d giddily anticipate the hour he returns my umbrella or keeps it laid in his room’s desk.
Now I’m two weeks in Japan, and the sunrays that usually lashed against my skin are beginning to sink into grey clouds. Autumn has always been my favourite season, if I may say it so plainly, even if it’s only my first time experiencing it, for I always looked forward to the long season of flameless sun, unlike that of summer, painless cold, unlike that of winter, and red showers, unlike those in spring. And of course, I wait for the romance of slowly pacing through these views and cozy undertakings with the one I love.
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But I go back outside my head and find that, along the crossing bustling with middle-schoolers and tourists, where space, stories, and shelter must be shared, I walk alone in silence and keep my wide umbrella to myself. Surely, I am in better conditions than my loved ones currently kept at home by the ongoing storms, and surely, as I had anticipated, there are breathtaking sights that have been waiting just for me. But today, when I could be empty-headed while it’s raining and busy on the way home, I fully understood how even warm-coloured seasons could be so blue.
As I take an empty seat on the train and place my bag on my lap, I’m taken to three months later when the trees have lost shade and the ground is blanketed in white. His mom did say his family was coming this December, but I didn't know time would fly this fast. We were sitting on uneven ground, trembling yet unwilling to return inside where there’s heat. We remain in the vastness we have for only ourselves, searching for rest after a long day of snowball fights and touring around the prefecture. He, in his awkward yet daring fashion, shyly asks if he could lie on my lap. And I, who could never reject if it was him who asked, made a comfortable bed of my lower body. While his eyes are closed and he’s gone half asleep, I gently stroke his fluffy hair as I croon to Suzy’s Winter Child: a mellifluous lullaby for my serene, beautiful boy. And occasionally, as we’ve always done, I’d open my umbrella with my free hand, just to keep us from the tender yet nippy snowflakes.
How blessed are we to pass the seasons apart just to reunite like this and take all coldness away from winter.
The hours go by without realising, but we remain motionless: he in his sleep, I, being his gentle fortress, and the deep female voice from somewhere announcing, 西院、西院です。We have arrived at Sai-in station. His pretty head has taken back its form as my handbag, and my umbrella, back to being partially closed and partially wet, not from snow, but from the drizzles from earlier.
I must have nodded my head off again. After all, it has happened quite a lot during commutes after long days. And during those stationary hours, or especially when I’m cozed up in bed, I am led to an oddly familiar place where I stand in the presence of everyone—including those whom I barely talk to anymore, but mostly him—and everything altogether. How peculiar, for my sleep has always been tight and my waking, at ease. Perhaps it happens simply for the reasons they say, that the body does things to keep itself warm in the midst of cold.
As I walk straight from the station to my dorm where I can finally continue my interrupted rest, I open my umbrella, as though by instinct, but hear no droplets strike against it. Perhaps, in that long hour on the train, the rain has gone with me to slumber and took along with it the wistful remnants of the recent summer. For in the silence of the empty streets and the deep blue evening reduced only by traffic signals and streetlights, I am accompanied and embraced by a similar gust of wind as that of earlier — only now I feel more secure and my head has gone as clear as the sky that is now a curtain of stars.
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September 8, 2026
