The Rain Owes No One
Written by Claire Josiah Bautista • Board by Jannah Duana | 17 July 26
They call it a bad day.
The ice cream seller folds his umbrella,
watching sweetness melt
faster than customers arrive.
Coins stay asleep
inside his pocket.
Across the street,
another man welcomes the same clouds,
lining umbrellas
like flowers waiting to bloom.
Business, at last,
begins with thunder.
The rain apologizes to neither.
It does not stop to explain itself.
It does not choose whose livelihood to soften
or whose to wash away.
It simply falls.
We spend our lives
mistaking inconvenience
for injustice,
assuming every storm
was sent with our name on it.
But the world
has never revolved
around a single pair of hands.
The harvest that feeds one family
may leave another with empty fields.
A closing door
becomes someone else's entrance.
The train one person misses
is the seat another has been praying for.
Fortune has always spoken
with two voices.
What sounds like mourning
in one home,
is celebration in the next.
The same fire
that turns forests into ash
returns tomorrow as soil.
Nothing arrives wearing only one meaning.
Not even loss.
There will be days
that refuse to choose you,
days that pass your doorstep
without leaving anything behind.
Do not mistake them
for days spent against you.
Some mornings
simply belong
to someone else.
And when your season comes,
when the same sky
opens above your name,
remember—somewhere, someone
is watching your sunshine
the way you once
watched their rain.