Love's Tears

In my tropical island home, rain is aseasonal. Without warning, it can fall on the sunniest day – an anomaly that is both dazzling and confusing for its absurdity.

It trickles down the kuapa fishpond walls, forming a translucent curtain of crystalline thread daintily obscuring daytime's brilliance. Then it settles like a scattering of a thousand lustrous pearls on the sun-drenched philodendron and muddied earth.

This incongruent display always rouses my melancholia, for although rain is a paean to jubilation, I believe what local lore tells me - that it is the lament of separation.

Legend says that the volcano goddess fell in love with a handsome warrior and asked to marry him. When he refused because he had already pledged his love to Lehua, the goddess fell into a destructive jealous rage and turned him into a twisted tree. 

Taking pity on the heartbroken Lehua, the gods turned her into a flower on the tree. 

It is said that if this flower is plucked, it will rain on that day because of the lovers' anguish over the breakup.

Alas! Undoubtedly someone, perhaps unknowingly or on a whim, has plucked a flower off its lover tree, so on this sunny day, it rains. 

It is rain that gathers into a puddle, then runs off into ocean waters that separate mountains. It is the sorrow of rupture. It is the misery of rain falling in one’s heart.

It is the kind of rain that makes me cry.