Rain-Stained Postcards

It begins the same way every time: the first shy whisper of rain against the window, like someone knocking politely on the edge of the world. I sit at my desk, listening, waiting, knowing the moment the sky opens, the impossible will arrive again.

The postcards always come in the rain.

They slip beneath my door with the hush of a secret, edges damp, ink blurring as if the words themselves are breathing. Some arrive curled like they carried the weight of storms across continents; others arrive crisp, smelling faintly of petrichor and places no map has ever held.

I never hear footsteps. Never see a shadow through the pebbled glass of the entryway. Only the soft scrape of card on wood and the quiet certainty that someone—something—has written to me again.

The first postcard came when I was sixteen. My mother had just left, dissolving into her own silence, and I walked through the house unable to speak, unable to feel anything but the hollow echo of her absence. Then, during a summer storm, a small blue postcard slid under the door. On the front: a watercolor coastline where the waves leaned toward shore like they were listening. On the back: a single line.

“Some places hold you even when people don’t.”

No name. No signature. No return address.

I held it for hours, letting the rain dry from the ink, imagining a world painted solely from longing.

Years passed. Storms came. And with each one, another postcard arrived.

A town made of windows reflecting memories.
A forest where the trees remembered your footsteps.
A train station for people who were trying to leave themselves behind.
A library where lost words slept in glass jars.

Always a single line of longing on the back. Always something tender and aching, like the whisper of a stranger who somehow knew my heart better than I did.

I kept them all. Dozens. Then hundreds. Enough to fill shoeboxes tucked beneath my bed, arranged by the kind of ache they carried—unspoken confessions, almost-forgotten hopes, soft reminders that life, even in the rain, was still quietly reaching for me.

Tonight, the rain is heavy, falling in long, silver threads that comb the darkness. I sit on the floor surrounded by postcards, each one glowing faintly in the lamplight, each one a doorway into a world that shouldn’t exist but does.

I think about the places they describe, the strange geography of yearning. I think about the hand that writes them, the voice I’ve never heard, the presence I’ve never seen. I think about why they chose me.

Then, as thunder trembles through the room, a new postcard slides under the door.

This one is different.

The paper is thicker, like handmade pulp. The illustration on the front shows a narrow street with glowing puddles, every reflection brighter than the world it mirrored. Lanterns hang from doorways, and distant figures walk with umbrellas shaped like wings.

My breath catches.

This looks like here.

Like my own street, but transformed—softened, dream-struck, as though the rain had peeled back the world and revealed the version of it that lived underneath.

With trembling fingers, I turn it over.

“The place you keep waiting for has always been you.”

The words are smudged, not by rain, but by the warmth of the writer’s thumb. For the first time, I see something personal in the ink—something human, vulnerable, close.

I stand and walk to the door.

For years, something has been bringing me these fragments of longing. For years, I’ve lived in them instead of in myself. But now, the storm feels different. The air is thick with possibility, like the sky is holding its breath.

I open the door.

Rain rushes in, cool and wild. The street glows just like the illustration, puddles shimmering with reflections more brilliant than the lamps that cast them. The world smells like wet earth and new beginnings.

And there, at the end of the street, stands a figure with an umbrella shaped like a wing.

They turn slowly. Waiting.

Maybe they have always been waiting.

Maybe some connections are born in silence before they ever learn to speak.

I step into the rain, leaving the postcards behind. All except the newest one, warm against my palm—a storm-born message finally bringing me home.