I do believe it, sweetheart. I think it works like this: They blur as they pour down, but they’re there – tight; bunched up – too tied up in knots to be heard. Only when they build up, one on top of the other, big and puffy as a marshmallow, spread out like a carpet over the big open sky, that you can see each word. If you were up there, I mean, wayyy up there, you could see them. The clouds are just words built up, coiled like a spring, ready to release. Just waiting to be let go.

I know you want to know, so I’ll just tell you – everyone does: you and me and everyone else. To understand why is to start to understand another thing as well. Words are normally spoken, yes, most people use them that way, but as you get older … you will see. More and more often people you talk to will keep them. The words. They keep the words inside there heads. Some of them make it right up to the very tip of their tongues, but they don’t say them. And words – just like anything else – have to go somewhere, so they push and borrow and dig down deep inside you and me and your school teachers and mom and people you don’t know – people you may never know. Down to there tummies. It usually hurts, that feeling. People call that feeling lots of things, but now you know it’s the feeling of words unspoken. Everyone has that feeling sometimes. So whether people’s words are in English like ours or French like Babar or Spanish like Dora teaches you, they can dig into your tummy all the same.

That feeling, it has to go somewhere else at some point too. Here is the really big part – so just like our words are tight and deep inside us, they build up in the sky as well. The sky feels the unspoken words of every person. It has forever.

Oh my sweetheart, I haven’t told you the real secret about the sky and the words and the rain just yet – the story isn’t over so don’t feel bad. You see, the sky gets lonely up there in its big blueness that it lives in. So when words travel up to it and it feels them, it doesn’t feel the bad tummy tingling, not at all – it feels connected to us. Connection is the deepest kind of happiness anything can feel and the sky feels that. So it wants to help us in return. It wants to take our tangled words and unravel them and see what we forgot to say or were too scared to say.

The words make the sky feel closer to the earth, closer to us all. So it gathers up all the world’s words, builds them up into huge puffy clouds and when it’s ready, it opens them up. Then it rains – it rains down all the thoughts we wish we’d said right back on top of us. To makes the sky smell pretty and the grass greener and the flowers bloom – the world refreshes as unspoken words are said.

And now with the words outside of us, they can be let go by our tummies. It clears all the sadness from inside us out and washes away the sadness from everything, which is why all the colors of everything are brighter. Everything is refreshed. You are as light as the sky in the rain.

Original work by me, October 2, 2010.