Nothing warms my soul more than standing over my bin, wringing my cheery rainbow-striped socks into it.

Sometimes I see people walking around on a rainy day in ponchos, and I think, hmm, that’s smart. Sure, it looks a little dorky, but if you can get past that, you ought to be pretty dry.

Wrong. Ponchos do not up the dry factor at all. But the dork factor is preserved quite pristinely, on the other hand.

Getting caught in the rain at the army supplies market down at Beach Road, where a bunch of colleagues and I went for lunch, I don’t recall why I didn’t actually turn back and get an umbrella when the thought flashed through my head while it was still sunny. But standing there watching the downpour, while an enterprising shop owner pushed ponchos to us, somebody must have thought it was a good idea getting those.

And getting the flimsy disposable ones, too.

But trudging back some 500m with suede sneakers and large puddles all over proved too much for the ponchos to handle. Walking in squishy shoes also reminded me of a trekking trip I went on after losing a bet that I’d sooner opt to forget.

And five people walking in single file like plastic hooded trashbagged Ku Klux Klan members also turned heads. I don’t know which suffered more; my shoes or my pride.

And yet, people seemed to think it was a good idea, just as I had previously. Foolishly.

A group of ladies stopped one of us on the way back, asking where she could get one. She looked disappointed when told she’d have to go all the way back to the army market for it.

As my editor said, after, “In the land of cotton, the one-dollar poncho is king.”

When the ache in your chest spreads into a churning around your stomach, feeling like it’s constantly being tugged downward, a premonition of something bad to fall, you walk around most of the day carrying an odd-balanced load on most of your torso. And trying so hard to shake it off, but it’s almost bonded to you, a part of you, eating and consuming you to grow stronger.

Someone once said that being a scorpio—a water sign—spelt currents of emotional waves, a lifetime of eroding waters washing over me. A good and bad thing, she had said. But typically bad, if I don’t know how to manage it.

I don’t. What seems miniscule to another seems like a torrent of caustic waste crashing over my head. And all you can do is gasp and stand, rooted, amidst the drenching acid, the icy splash.

The good thing about water is that it bends and moulds itself to the curves of its surroundings, no matter how harsh. Overtime, it may even erode the harsh surfaces, improving what it’s around.

But it also needs to be held within those channels. It yearns to be. Water splashing out of its receptacle is useless and dries up. It wants to belong, to be held, to be enfolded in its surroundings’ warm arms but sometimes—just sometimes—cracks and holes in its jar causes it to slip away. Unwillingly.

And dry, without a trace, on the sidewalk.

Love
is the extremely
difficult realisation
that something other
than oneself is real.
— Iris Murdoch