The Rain That Raised Me

I was raised by thunder.

Not in the literal sense, of course. I had parents—flawed, hurting, sometimes kind, often distant—but when I think back to what shaped me most, it wasn’t them. It wasn’t teachers or friends or the awkward stretch of my adolescence.

It was the rain.

Back then, the monsoon came like a sudden confession, washing everything away before anyone had time to prepare. And I liked that about it. The wildness. The way it forced the world to stop and listen. In those months, the air always smelled like wet soil and aching hearts, and I found comfort in the storm’s honesty.

I was ten when my father left. He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t leave a note. Just vanished into the breath of morning while the kettle boiled and the rain tapped gently on our kitchen window. I sat at the table in my school uniform, swinging my legs, waiting for him to come back with milk or a newspaper.

He never did.

That evening, the clouds burst. I ran outside, barefoot, and stood in the street behind our little house, drenched in grief I didn’t yet have words for. My mother screamed for me to come back inside, but I couldn’t. The sky was crying harder than I ever could, and I felt seen by it.

That’s when it began—my ritual of running to the rain whenever life broke me a little more.

Years passed. My mother worked double shifts. I learned how to cook eggs and silence. I stopped asking questions about my father. School became a blur of half-finished homework and heavy eyelids. But the rain always returned, dependable as loss.

During one of those early teen storms, I began talking to the sky. Not in a way people would notice or mock. Just quietly. Soft whispers to the clouds as if they might carry my thoughts somewhere beyond the smallness of our home.

“I miss him,” I’d say.

“Is he still alive?”

“Do you think he ever loved me?”

Sometimes, I thought I heard answers in the wind.

By sixteen, I had found sketching. Rainy days were now spent curled by the window, drawing faces I didn’t recognize—some kind, some cruel, all of them imagined. I began to write too. Stories that felt like bandages, characters who made decisions I never dared to. In those stories, people apologized. They came back. They stayed.

Art gave me language for my loneliness. The rain gave me the space to speak it aloud.

There was one summer when the monsoon didn’t come. The days stretched long and hot, the soil cracked with thirst. That year, I almost gave up—on school, on art, on myself. Without the rain, I felt like I had no anchor.

But then, in the middle of August, when I had nearly stopped believing, the sky turned grey again.

The first drop hit the dusty ground like a heartbeat returning from the dead. I stood outside as it fell. This time I didn’t cry. I smiled. I knew I had survived the worst of it.

Now, at twenty-three, I live in a city where the rain is rare. But whenever it does visit, I make time for it. I sit by the window with tea, let the drops echo on the roof like old friends knocking. I still talk to it sometimes. Not to ask questions, but to say thank you.

Thank you for raising me gently when the world did not.

Thank you for listening when no one else could.

Thank you for reminding me that endings can still be beautiful.

My story doesn’t have a grand triumph. There was no reunion. My father remains a mystery, and my mother is still learning how to love out loud. But I have made peace with that. I’ve stopped needing the answers I once chased through thunderstorms.

What I have instead is this: a life I built with quiet resilience. A voice sharpened by silence. A heart softened by storms.

And the rain, always the rain—falling like memory, lifting like prayer.