rain in June, a corrective

Everyone romanticizes the first rain. There are poems about it. Songs. People stand on balconies and photograph the clouds. The smell of the earth, the cool air, the relief after May's cruelty. This is all real. I don't dispute the smell or the relief. But nobody writes about the second rain, which arrives four days later and floods the basement parking. Or the third rain, which happens at exactly 6pm and catches you on foot and ruins the shoes. Or the sixth rain, which finds you at a market without an umbrella and turns the lanes into rivers that carry with them things you'd rather not look at. Nobody romanticizes coming home in August soaked to the knees, the auto refused to go further because the road was underwater, standing in wet socks in your own hallway wondering at what point you became someone who lives in a city where this is a thing that simply happens. The monsoon is two months long. The first three days are beautiful. The rest is logistics. I love it anyway. That's the embarrassing part. Every June I stand on the balcony and photograph the clouds.