The Year I Wrote in Rainwater

The year I turned thirty, I stopped writing in ink.

It began on a Tuesday in April, when the skies split open like a sigh and I found myself in a forgotten park, notebook in hand, drenched but delighted. I had no umbrella, no agenda, just a quiet hour between obligations. I sat on a moss-covered bench while the clouds wept their secrets. I watched rain stitch silver lines across the page.

And I thought: What if I wrote with this?

That night, I placed a mason jar on my windowsill to catch the rain. I labeled it "Poems, Maybe," in my careful, looping script. By morning, it was half full. By evening, it shimmered with promise. I dipped a paintbrush into the jar, touched it to paper, and let the words come. They bled and bloomed like violets—fragile, untamed.

No one told me water could write.

I was a poet before I was a person.

My mother says I came into the world humming. I don’t know if she means it literally, or if she’s just being poetic—either way, I accept it. I remember scribbling odes on the backs of school tests, tucking haikus into my sock drawer, whispering metaphors to the moon.

But somewhere between rent payments and a corporate job with no windows, I forgot how to write without agenda. My poems became content. Bullet-pointed stanzas. Optimized sadness. Hashtag heartbreak.

Until the rain gave me back the ritual.

Writing in rainwater changed the pace of my life.

You can't rush a brush dipped in clouds. You wait. You breathe. You become still. There's no backspace, no autocorrect. Every stroke is a risk. Some pages warped. Some smeared. But some—oh, some!—felt alive in a way ink never did. They shimmered with accident and awe.

I wrote about the people I had lost: my father, who taught me the difference between silence and quiet. A lover whose touch I still wore like perfume. Friends who faded without warning, like street art washed away in storms.

Rainwater made grief gentler. More like a lullaby than a lament.

One day, I took a page with me to a café—a small poem about forgetting. I left it on a table, folded like a secret. The next week, I did it again. And again.

By July, I was leaving rainwater poems all over the city: tucked into library books, pinned to telephone poles, slipped between bananas at the grocery store. I signed them only with a single initial: L.

I didn’t want credit. I wanted connection.

People began to notice. Someone started an Instagram account called Notes from L. They posted photos of my poems and added captions like, “Found this while crying in my car. Needed it.” Or, “Who are you, L? You made me believe in magic again.”

I watched from afar, heart thudding like a poem read aloud. I never wrote to be famous. I wrote because it made me feel less alone.

But being read—that was a kind of resurrection.

In September, it stopped raining for thirty-one days. My jar emptied. I panicked.

I tried tap water. It felt flat, too filtered. I tried sparkling water, and the bubbles danced across the page but took the words with them. I tried tears—too salty. Wine—too stained.

Nothing worked.

So I stopped writing. I took long walks. I touched trees. I let the ache build.

On the first day of October, the rain returned, as soft as a whisper. I stood barefoot on the porch with my arms outstretched and whispered thank you to the sky.

The poems came back stronger.

By winter, my work had reached a small publisher. They offered me a chapbook deal. I told them I wouldn’t print anything unless I could use real rainwater in the ink. They thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

Eventually, we compromised. I brewed a special ink with the help of a calligrapher: part rainwater, part charcoal, part lavender oil. We called it Skyscript. The chapbook was called “Weathered.”

It sold out in three days.

People said they could feel the difference.

Now, a year later, I still write in rainwater.

It reminds me that beauty doesn’t have to be permanent to be meaningful. That fragility is a form of strength. That stories don’t have to shout to be heard.

I teach workshops now—“Writing with the Weather.” I bring jars of rain, brushes, pages. People cry. People laugh. People remember how to speak their hearts in soft, strange ways.

One woman told me, “I wrote to my mother for the first time in twelve years, and I don’t even know if I’ll send it. But writing it helped.”

That’s what poetry is. Not a solution. A salve.

I don’t know how long this season of rain will last.

Maybe next year I’ll write in snowmelt, or fog, or fire ash. Maybe I’ll stop writing altogether and grow roses in the shape of sonnets.

But for now, I’ll keep leaving poems in places people don’t expect to find them.

Because sometimes the world just needs a line, soft as water, to remember it’s still alive.

And I am still writing.

Still listening to the sky.

Still catching every drop