Sitting on my bed, looking through the single tiny window of my equally tiny apartment, watching the rain drum against the glass, the only wash it gets this high up. My magazine lies open but unread next to me as I’m overcome by the natural beauty of the rain, and the clouds, and the grey sky. Distant rumbling thunder completes the mood, the occasional bolt of lightning highlighting the tall buildings around me.
I see below me, around ten floors, a woman sitting at her window as well, like me. She too is embracing the weather.
It’s been hot, so hot, in the city. My shirt lies over the back of my chair, pulled slightly away and at an angle from my tiny desk. The blinking light on my notebook computer betrays what I was doing before the rain came down.
When I first moved in, away from my family, away from my friends, in a strange new city with strange new people, I had enough money for a security deposit and three months’ rent, as long as I didn’t mind living here. The desk and the bed fought each other for a place at the window, and while the desk put in a brave performance, the bed won. I prefer approaching both sides of sleep with the city in my eyes. So the desk, ever valiant, sits against the other wall.
The woman below me has seen me and waves. I wave back. She looks around my age, but it’s hard to tell with the distance and the water running down the glass. It also seems that she has shed her shirt as well, on account of the heat.
I cast my eye over the magazine and decide it can wait another day. I lie back on my bed, and watch the rain fall, listening to its drowning out of the world below, and fall asleep, knowing that this moment is mine forever. And hers.