{desert rain}

It was a cloudy night in Spring, 2007. I had just finished my nighttime computer class, the most boring class ever at the most inconvenient time ever. No one wants to listen to someone drone on about Microsoft Office all through dinner time and beyond. Or at least I didn't. But when my class was finally over, I hurried out of the room to find that it was pouring down rain. I zipped my jacket up and hunched my shoulders a bit in anticipation of stepping out into the warm but very wet evening, but before I could get hit by a drop of water, I spotted something zooming towards me at high speed. It was my boyfriend on his longboard. He was clasping a huge Starbucks cup in one hand and an umbrella in the other.

After pushing me to the dorms on his longboard so I wouldn't ruin my leather shoes, he handed me a pair of his sweatpants and a hoodie and shoved me into the bathroom to change.

And then, shoe-less and umbrella-less, we tripped out through the rain into a giant dark grassy field. Back then, there were no lights on Johnson Field, and we were completely alone, surrounded by the distant glow of street lights and the warm, pouring rain. We danced. We played tag. We slid and cartwheeled and spun and cavorted in sopping, messy glee.

In the desert, we don't hide from clouds. We celebrate the rain.

We still run out into the rain to commemorate that moment. If it's raining, we make a point to lift our faces to the sky, get a little bit wet, and remember that night.

Because that was the night he first told me he loved me.

And that rainy night changed everything.