“Notes Left by the Rain”

Notes Left by the Rain

Poetic Fiction – 700+ words

The rain began before dawn, soft at first, then steadily, like someone tuning the rhythm of the world. It battered rooftops, washed dust from glass, and filled the small town of Hartwell with a steady heartbeat of water. Maya Hart, who had been awake the entire night wrestling with the blank page on her desk, listened to it as if it were whispering something she couldn't quite catch.

She hadn’t written a single paragraph in four months. Not since the night she lost Ezra.

Ezra—her best friend, her almost-love, the one who’d believed in her stories even when she didn’t. He used to bring her chai at midnight and say, “Words don’t leave you, Maya. Sometimes they just wander.”

But Ezra had wandered farther than words ever could. And she hadn’t found a way to write him back.

When morning came, the storm broke open. Maya stepped outside to feel the air—fresh, sharp, newly washed. She walked her usual route to the park, where she always went when she was stuck, hoping the trees or the sky would remind her that creation was possible.

But today something else awaited her.

On the back of a bench—a bench she recognized instantly because she and Ezra once carved a tiny star into its corner—something shimmered.

Words.

Not paint. Not chalk. Not carved.

But written in liquid light, as if each letter had been shaped from leftover pieces of rain.

"You don’t have to be brave. You only have to stay."

Maya froze. Her breath faltered.

She touched the words. They glowed under her fingertips, warm despite the cool morning air. Then they dissolved, slipping back into droplets that rolled down the bench and disappeared.

It took her a full minute to breathe again.

Because Ezra had said those exact words to her once—months before he died, when she’d wanted to abandon her novel and he’d insisted she had something worth giving the world.

A coincidence, she told herself.

And yet her hands wouldn’t stop trembling.

The next day, more rain. The kind that made the town blur into watercolor.

Maya didn’t wait for the sky to clear. She grabbed her coat and ran outside the moment the clouds lightened. Her shoes splashed through puddles, cold water seeping in, but she didn’t care.

She searched every street like someone looking for a lost piece of their life.

And there it was.

On the side of a bus shelter, glimmering as if lit from inside:

"I never left. I am just where you keep your stories."

Her heart clenched so hard she had to sit down. These were not random words. They were intimate, specific, unmistakably Ezra.

She remembered him tapping her notebook once, saying, “If I ever disappear, that’s where I’ll hide. Right here, between your pages.”

Maya felt the world tilt slightly, as if gravity had changed its mind.

“Ezra?” she whispered to the empty air.

The letters shimmered for another second, then ran downward like melting silver. She watched them vanish, rain reclaiming what it had borrowed.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh. Mostly, she wanted to believe.

And for the first time in months, she felt a small, warm ache of possibility.

Every rain after that brought another message.

On a brick wall behind the bookstore:

"The world is still beautiful, even when you forget to look."

On a bus window fogged by mist:

"Write it down, Maya. Someone needs it."

On the side of a lamppost, where raindrops clung like tiny stars:

"Your grief is not a grave. It is a garden waiting."

Each message appeared only to her—she knew because she’d tried to show others, but by the time anyone else arrived, the droplets had already loosened and fallen.

Soon, she began carrying a notebook again. Not to write stories, but to copy the rain’s messages before they dissolved.

Little by little, the heaviness inside her began to soften. Grief didn’t leave—it simply became a quieter companion.

One evening, after a storm so fierce it rattled windows, Maya stepped outside into a night washed clean. The moon was low, tangled in clouds, and the world smelled of wet earth and promise.

She headed toward the old bench in the park.

Her breath caught when she saw the longest message yet, stretching across the wood in flowing silver curves:

"You once asked me where stories come from. They come from love, Maya. From losing it, finding it, holding it, remembering it. Your story isn’t over. Mine is just written in a different place now."

This time, she didn’t touch the letters. She let them glow. She let herself feel everything—the pain, the beauty, the strange miracle of it all.

Then she whispered, “Thank you.”

The letters trembled, sparkling brighter.

And the rain—light, gentle, the softest drizzle—began to fall again. When the drops touched the writing, the message unraveled like silk, flowing back into the world.

Maya opened her notebook. She began writing not copies, but new sentences—her own.

The words came slowly, as if waking from sleep, but they came.

She wrote until her fingers ached. She wrote until the rain soaked her pages. She wrote until she felt something deep inside shift back into place.

When she finished, she looked up.

On the empty bench, one last shimmering line glowed faintly:

"I’m proud of you."

Maya closed her book to protect the page from the rain, and for the first time since Ezra’s death, she felt steady. Whole. Held.

The storm eased. The droplets collapsed into tiny rivers. The message disappeared.

But she didn’t need to see it again.

Because this one she carried inside her.

And as she walked home beneath the quiet rain, Maya realized something beautiful:

The notes left by the rain were not just from someone she had lost.

They were guiding her back to the person she was becoming.