It’s already tomorrow as I sit here in front of my computer. The clock is long past midnight and yet here I sit, listening to the rain. It drips and it drops, splashing outside my home. I hear it hitting the street outside, I hear it sliding from the jutting parts of the houses to fall to the ground. The sound echoes through my open window and I sit, and I listen, and I hate the world.

No, I don’t hate the world. Actually I rather like it. Right now what I hate is the cold. I don’t mean that’s it’s cold and I should put a jersey on, it’s the cold I feel on the inside, and I envy each raindrop outside my window, dropping into puddles and pools. Today I sat and I felt the cold, and the sky obliged my unease by opening up and crying upon me.

I live in a country where people don’t touch each other. They don’t even shake hands, really, they just bow. For one like me, to which hugging and touching to connect to someone is almost like breathing, living here is sometimes like suffocating. I become hyper-aware of every touch to my body – the press on the trains, the high-fives at basketball, the slightest brush of the shoulder of someone passing by. This place is my desert, and the dripping water of the rain does nothing to halt my unease.

People would flock to me, tell me that getting a hug from me was different, somehow better. For me, it is as breathing, to feel the warmth of the other person and connect with something beyond my arms around them. To comfort and be comforted by a touch, short or long. Connect with my lover, family, friends… connect in a way that is a warmth in my soul.

Today I went nowhere. I didn’t want to see the light of warmth all around me and know it would still be cold. I know that tomorrow I will get up and go out, and bear it like I always do, for in many ways I love to be here. I know I will be fine.

But not today.

Today I sat at home, and listened to the rain.