It is only when it rains that I come home to myself, when your eyes on my skin don't stab like a handful of sand spurs and my own gaze doesn't automatically avert itself to stare down your ear. The sound of the rain dampens the noise of my footfalls and it becomes easier to tiptoe around the sleeping monsters that live outside my door, easier to unlock my small cabinet and crouch inside.
In the sun I would like to think that I could move out of that cabinet someday and go somewhere else, move to Gibraltar and change my name and make butter sculptures and set up tin-cans-and-string phones with the little monkeys, all without waking up those monsters. That I could patch up these cracks with slivers of stained glass and scuttle like a hermit crab into someone else's shell, and the monsters would stay put, throw a goodbye party, wave white handkerchiefs at my boat.
When it rains I remember slowly, like trying to make out the words of a song heard through an open window, like turning out the light only to discover that the stars always glow in the dark.
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