escort diary® of Jolie: I miss the summer rain
There is a thing that happens in Sydney that I have never seen this extreme anywhere else, and I grew up in a country that considers itself the authority on weather having moods.
The sky splits.
Not metaphorically... literally.
You will be standing on a street in Surry Hills and above you the sun is out, full and warm and completely committed to the idea that today is a beautiful day. And then you turn your head forty-five degrees and the other half of the sky is black. Not grey, not overcast, black, in the way that skies are black in paintings of shipwrecks and Old Testament punishments.
It looks like someone drew a line down the middle of the atmosphere and gave each half to a different season.
And then it rains.
While the sun is shining.
On you.
Simultaneously.
The first time this happened to me I stood on the footpath with my mouth open like one of my noisy miners sunning themselves, except I was getting wet, and I could not process what I was experiencing because my French brain had been raised on a very simple weather binary: either it is raining or it is not raining. These are separate states, they do not overlap, the sky chooses one and commits, the way a French woman chooses a position at dinner and does not waver. Sydney's sky has no such discipline. Sydney's sky is running both programs at the same time and sees no contradiction and I have lived here for a decade and I am still not over it.
I love the rain here.
I love it in a way that I think genuinely confuses the Australians around me, who treat rain the way Parisians treat tourists: as a minor inconvenience to be endured until the thing they actually want comes back. They duck, they cover their heads, they run between awnings with the urgency of people who believe water is a personal attack. And I am standing in the middle of it, face up, getting completely soaked, having possibly the best three minutes of my week, with the amazing weight of the raindrops the size of coins and the scent of wet bitumen and fresh eucalyptus.
I cannot fully explain this except to say that rain is the only weather that touches you.
Sun warms you but it keeps its distance.
Wind moves around you.
Cold is an absence, not a presence.
Rain is the only weather that actually puts its hands on you: on your face, your arms, the back of your neck, the specific patch of collarbone that is apparently the most sensitive part of the human body when water hits it unexpectedly.
It is intimate in a way that I think people have stopped noticing because they are too busy trying to stay dry, and I understand the impulse to stay dry, I am not an idiot, but I also think that the impulse to stay dry is sometimes the impulse to stay untouched, and I am not interested in staying untouched. I have built my entire life around the opposite.
There is a particular kind of Sydney rain that I am obsessed with: the summer rain. The rain that arrives in January or February when the air has been thick and heavy and too hot for days and the city has been holding its breath, swimming in humidity, and then the sky cracks open and the water is warm. Warm rain, rain that doesn't make you flinch, rain that you can stand in and feel your body actually relax instead of contract.
This is the rain I am waiting for.
It's a little pleasure that I have not yet fulfilled because it is currently winter and the rain is the wrong temperature (although the last few days have seen the right amount of water for me), but I am putting it here as a declaration of intent: I cannot wait to sit in the middle of the street in the summer rain.
Not a busy street...I am dramatic but I am not suicidal.
A quiet street.
A back lane in Darlinghurst where the jasmine would have already flowered, maybe, or one of those strange little dead-end streets in Elizabeth Bay where nobody goes and the trees hang over the road and everything feels like it belongs to a different, slower version of Sydney that the developers haven't found yet (or cannot touch). I want to sit on the asphalt in the warm rain and feel the water hit my skin and not be going anywhere and not be doing anything and not be performing any version of productivity or ambition or purpose. Just a woman sitting in the road in the rain because the rain is warm and she wanted to and nobody told her she couldn't.
I think about this more than a functional adult probably should.
The thing about rain is that it equalises. You cannot be important in the rain, you cannot be impressive, you cannot maintain the version of yourself that works in temperature-controlled rooms with good lighting and dry hair. The rain takes your hair and does whatever it wants with it. The rain takes your clothes and makes them heavier. The rain takes your face and washes off whatever you put on it that morning and leaves you with the face underneath, which is always better, which is always more honest, which is always the face that somebody should have been looking at all along.
Summer will come at some point (although it IS truly hard to believe while I am nestled in front of my heater). And when it arrives, the first proper summer storm, the one that breaks the heat and turns the streets into rivers and makes the whole city smell like wet concrete and jasmine, I will go outside.
I will find my quiet street, or the private marina I snatched access to last year, and I will sit down.
And I will stay there until I am completely, thoroughly, unapologetically soaked.
You are welcome to join me, but you should know in advance: I will not share the umbrella.
I won't be bringing one.
