The Downpour That Held My Silent Scream

I did not cry when I left his apartment. I wiped my face, buttoned my coat, and walked into a city that had forgotten how to hold me. But the sky remembered.
The rain began as an apology it could not deliver, then as a verdict, then as a flood. And somewhere between the second and third drumbeat on the asphalt, the dam inside me simply gave up. I took off my coat. I took off my shoes—and I stood barefoot in the cold while the water climbed my ankles like something alive.
I raised my arms. Not to ask for anything. Just to let the sky see that I was still here, still warm-blooded, still capable of a single trembling grace. The lace against my skin, the floral skirt blooming around me like a wound healing in reverse—I was not drowning. I was being baptized by the very city that had tried to make me small.
He said love was a quiet thing. He was wrong. It is this: two hands pressed into wet pavement while you dance for no one, and feel, for one shivering second, that you are finally enough.

Editor: Deep Sea