十一月, 下着雨

November caught me unawares, came up to me like an old friend, placed a hand on my shoulder, whispered into my ear the gentle sound of rain, and unloaded a bagful of memories.

In the pre-dawn air, i saw - or smelt, rather - memories of the last weeks of school. I must have been seven or eight, and we played on the bare concrete floor of our classroom, between plastic tables, as umbrellas dried by the corridor and cats and dogs fell from the sky.

Sometimes, the rain would come in through the windows, forming puddles that traced rivers and lakes, an imaginary monsoon world. At home that seldom happened. At the sound of thunder, before the clouds gave way, we'd run for the windows - 小心喷雨! -and slam them shut. We kept the rain outside -

- at night, I'd keep my face against the window and let my gaze blur against the rain, as the falling droplets became an orange-hued haze as they passed before the streetlight outside my third-storey room. I was older then, and had discovered melancholy, and nostalgia.

When I was far away, summertime thunderstorms would bring me home, as if their wind driven sheets fell not on the nineteenth-century cobblestones of the Canal Saint-Martin, but along Hougang Avenue 2, between the bougainvilla and the playground.

I looked up at the brightening sky above, and down at the slick grey ground beneath, as the raindrops sprinkled colour on so many faded memories.