Soul Of Rain

​Joaquin and his female pitbull Coco getting caught in a sudden torrential downpour while standing next to an old classical Hampton streetlight pole, where the pale, sickly beam of yellow light cut through the sheet of falling water to illuminate the slick asphalt beneath their feet, casting a shivering, distorted shadow of man and dog across the flooded curb while Coco pressed her sodden, muscle-bound flank against Joaquin’s knees in a desperate bid for shelter from the deafening roar of rain bouncing off the rusted cast-iron lamp base, leaving them both stranded beneath the useless glass globe as the rising deluge transformed the quiet suburban street into a swirling, muddy river that threatened to wash away whatever fragile purpose had brought them out into the night, where a dreadful feeling of death carrying the same psychological, painful thoughts similar to his mother's death 15 years ago seeped into his mind while the cascade of pelting rain smashed against Coco's back with water drowning and overflowing over the grass of the soccer field without any drainage, and as those ancient, agonizing memories of his mother’s passing began to drown out the present moment, the violent cascade continued to smash relentlessly against Coco’s trembling back, overflowing the sodden turf of the adjacent field where the clogged, forgotten drains failed to swallow the deluge, turning the entire patch of grass into a mirror of standing black water that reflected only the suffocating sky above them, so that standing there in the cold, unsparing deluge, watching the water rise around his ankles, he was forced to confront the crushing truth that all the decades of relentless crawling out of absolute, bone-deep poverty, all the sacrifices of being the only one among eight Indigenous siblings to finish high school and earn three university degrees, and every triumph of a successful career built specifically to shield his mother in her twilight years and give her the dignity she had been denied, could not protect him from this second, slower death of the soul, which remained a dark, unavoidable hurt that stripped away the future Joaquin had planned and left him standing entirely alone in the rain, holding only the ghost of a promise that time had cruelly broken.