I leave work to meet the head of the storm that’s all the village has been talking about for the past few days. Strong winds are going to come, the power might go out, it’s still too early to say. The news never seems to predict these things correctly, but at least we’re not on the coast, right? The sky is an eerie, dusky gray and a tree with half-yellow leaves whips sideways from behind someone’s fence and at that moment it hits me: this feels like a monsoon.
It shouldn’t be such a difficult connection to make, a monsoon is just a storm of a different name, temperament, and climate zone, but so little here is able to remind me of Arizona that the shock of it bowls me over. Sometimes I look at a piece of land and try to imagine what it would look like in the desert, like a photo overlay, but I can never see it. The two landscapes might as well be on different planets for everything they have in common. I start grinning madly, even as the wind and rain batter me sideways. I hadn’t realised how badly I needed a monsoon. A monsoon contains the essence of joy, and that is what I need to feel. I do not think about how there is no thunder or lightning in sight, I just watch the reborn bits of litter swirl around on the empty street, like I did on so many nights walking home from my last job in Phoenix.
I’ve always thought that summer should have been designated a monsoon summer, given some special award. When the season came upon us it monsooned nearly every night for what must’ve been two months. I got used to power cuts and leaving my outdoor job hours before closing when the orders came down from corporate, and during the days that followed the violent, stormy nights the temperature rarely came up past 105. It was the best last summer I could’ve asked for. It felt like the universe knew I wouldn’t see another one.
Storms here are unremarkable. There’s wind and rain almost constantly, and a storm is just an extension of that, a more extreme version of the regular weather. The monsoon changes everything, the air, the earth, the water supply, the season. The way Phoenix looks on a summer day and during a monsoon are as incompatible as if it had become a tundra, even though this shift can occur in only a few minutes.
I miss the thrill of a monsoon, even with all the fear and destruction, there is always the thrill of upheaval. It turns the harsh, extreme, unchanging landscape into something completely different. That is why it is a season, a way to mark the passage of time when we have so few other physical reminders of it. I hear the news from the other side of the world and they say that summer now starts in March instead of April, that the outside world is now uninhabitable for six months instead of four, that monsoon season is a thing of the past. Summer is reaching its claws farther and farther into the land, into the people that suck it dry without being told to think of it that way, and I can’t help imagining the land standing still year-round, pale blue sky and sun and dry earth and nothing in between. I go through the pictures I’ve kept from my childhood and try to remember what month they were captured in, but the only time I see an indication is an image of me standing out in the street, my shorts and t-shirt soaked to the bone, splashing happily on the flooded tarmac with my neighbors as the rain pours down around us. Monsoon season, there’s no question at all.
I am lucky to live where I do, to measure time in daffodils and tulips and ferns and the tilling of the fields. I am lucky to be surrounded by life; glorious, brilliant life, which doles out its beauty in generous bucketfuls and only asks that we put up with the rain when it comes. People who grew up here can’t see the miracles of the roadside weeds and microscopic wildflowers and morning frost and the soft babble of water running through the woods. It’s like the place I come from has given me a superpower, small bursts of happiness to be doled out every time I step outside. And still, when I’m walking on a sunny spring morning and listening to the birds sing, I think of the desert dying, of the fact that it reached 100 degrees in March this year. I can’t stop carrying it around with me, sickening as a kidney stone.
The curse of nostalgia is that you are never fully rooted. I tell myself now that that’s all I want, to have one place that’s mine forever, one timeline that will continue forward, one life that I can make for myself. In reality, I think I will always be in pieces. I am scattered around the world, in lives that I stupidly imagine I may just be able to drop back into and continue one day, as if time doesn’t move, as if the monsoon will really die.
I leave the village, walk past the end of the streetlights that line the main road. At the end of a country lane the soft yellow light is on in the kitchen of the house that I still share with the person I am still learning not to love. Rain beats sideways onto the windows, ruffling the grass. Soon this place will split as well, rupture into parts that may very well scatter across the world again, back to the places they came from. For now, the house is here, bearing the brunt of the storm, readying itself for the changing season.
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