Small talk

I woke up suddenly this morning to a strange sound. I checked my phone for the time before I tried to figure out what the noise was. It was a little before 7:30—much earlier than I needed to be awake for work—so I had enough time to worry. Outside my slightly cracked blinds, I glimpsed the downpour that woke me.

I’ve seen rain before. When I was young, it used to hail in California, funny little stones that fell from the sky and we would stare in amazement as my parents rushed to park the cars inside. I remember learning what “drizzle” and “sprinkle” meant, yummy, rhyming words that described the most common showers I saw. Even though it stopped raining and signs to pray for the drought to end popped up, the memories remained.

In New Haven, I endured some winters where I wasn’t sure if they would ever end. Even though the dew never really faded in Portland, I was able to keep the dampness out of the house and that’s what mattered.

Here in Austin, it rains hot and heavy. The closest comparison I can think of is the monsoon rains in Pakistan, where you can see panoramic pirouettes of lightning flash across the plateau. No H-E-Bs, but we Punjabis also forgo jackets and umbrellas when it sprinkles.

Whenever people say they moved to Austin for the weather, I ask them where they’re from. For people from places like Minneapolis, I get it. This is their first time seeing the sun. They don’t realize it can be gentle, unlike the light here in Austin.

Austin is one of two places where I’ve gotten sunburnt. The first time, I had been hiking over 7,000 feet above the sea in Colombia, so I brushed it off as my fault for recklessly venturing too far into the sun’s domain and took home my sore shoulder as a souvenir.

I didn’t see any reason to feel unsafe lazing around my apartment’s pool, angling myself toward the sun while my friends talked shop in the cool water. I had covered myself with SPF everywhere, yet the sun had found that one last tender place to sink its rays into. For a week, I walked around with a blushing scalp and what looked like dandruff, my skin too sensitive for me to even try to hide it with a bun.

I told people about it afterward, still a little in shock and maybe sunsick. I talk to people now. At first, I had been afraid of how cold Connecticut had made me when it came to strangers, but I warmed up to small talk. 

I don’t know how, but the locals always figure out that I’m new and they love to warn me about the summer. I listen like a lone astronaut sent to an unfamiliar planet, trying to understand the violet sky here. I learned that mosquitos out at dawn and dusk are the likeliest to carry West Nile, that it’s more dangerous to drive through a flooded road with other cars than alone and that peppermint scents help keep bugs away. 

I still itch my bitten ankles. The man at the bar asks me my blood type. I respond with the most common one and he smiles, saying he knew I had sweet blood. 

Still, I try to push past the awkwardness, the discomfort. I go to parties where I only know one person, I stay after they leave and I do a pretty good job of making friends on the back patio.

At a UT Austin grad party, a girl comes up to me and tells me I’m what’s wrong with the city. I stiffen. There’s a million different reasons why she could be saying this, most notably that I’m probably the only person in the room who doesn’t pay for my tan, but to my relief, she follows it up by complaining about how all these Californians are changing the character of the city. My shoulders relax. Every other person here is a transplant and a girl from Boston tells her off before I can think of a response.

Most people here are nice, though. Even the woman who sidewiped me apologized, my wrist aching as I wrote down her insurance information. I was hit in the rain, the morning after flash flooding alerts kept half the city up through the night, and I remember freaking out as drops soaked the thin paper, worried that it would dissolve in my hands. Still, she came up to my window with her hood up and said sorry.

I didn’t know what to say. I was late to work and the cop was handing me my headlight, which had fallen off and was now dim. My dad had told me to drive my silver car with the headlights on in the rain so that others would see me. 

As I lay in bed this morning, I thought of the story a relative had once told me about the time our village in Pakistan flooded. It was fun at first, the warm rain perfect to play in and a respite from the heat that beats down, cracking the earth wide open. But the longer the rain goes on and the higher the puddles rise, the scarier it becomes. It’s a moment when a child discovers there are worse things than boredom from being kept indoors. After seven days, the world outside finally stilled and they could go outside to see it undone.

I still need to get my car fixed, but I think I know how to smalltalk about the weather now.