The Logic of Rain

There were, at one time, two brothers: Thav and Sura. They lived in a borderless suburb, in a place where beginning and end are not, and minds obscure folding time.

One afternoon, grey with the anticipation of intensity, they set off to hear a discourse at the academy: something novel dressed as Truth. But soon after departing, the sky began to tremble, indifferent and mechanical, and quickly collapsed into a hard rainfall. The brothers ducked into the nearest shelter, an indeterminate building with lowlights and humming, spectral music. It was, or had become, it seemed, a brothel.

Thav, ever rigidly signified, recoiled immediately. He groaned and complained, and declared the space impure, as if it were a poison rather than a refuge. He stepped back out into the now torrential downpour, believing that the teacher’s words might cleanse what this place could only pollute. 

Sura, younger but less possessed by form, remained. Not for pleasure… at least not yet. But for dryness, for delay. He sat quietly amidst the laughter and shimmer, and waited for the sky to shift.

At the academy, Thav sat dripping. The teacher spoke in rich words, a liturgy of righteousness. But Thav’s mind became unmoored. Instead of listening, it wandered, growing roots in other directions: regretting. Irritating. Longing. Am I missing out? What pleasures am I losing?

Meanwhile, in the brothel, Sura’s attention splintered. The dancers blurred into symbols of lust. His thoughts drifted upward toward hopeful purity, a better life, a real education. I could have just gone to school. What am I doing here? This is not where I am meant to be. I should have walked through the storm. I am not salt. I would not have dissolved.

The rain eventually ceased. The earth exhaled. Both brothers set out, compelled not by destiny but by guilt and shame, lust and frustration, a double reversal. Desire consumes its own tail. They soon met on the road, and at that very moment, lightning split the sky and smote them.

(There is no metaphor in the lightning, only precision.)

From the interstice between planes came the Collectors. Neither winged nor horned, the servants of Death are coldly procedural. They seized Thav and directed him downward toward the base realms.

Thav, indignant, yelled: “This is absurd! I am Thav. I was at the academy!” Struggling, he tried to complain, “My brother, Sura—he stayed at the brothel in sin, surrounded by naked bodies and poison. It is my brother who belongs below, not me!”

The Collectors, in voices flat and final, replied: “You misunderstand. You were in school, but your soul thirsted for sin. At the same time, your brother sheltered in the brothel, but longed for the temple of the academy. Place is completely relative. You are not what you do. Intention is the will of reality. Desire is the shape of becoming; you become what you desire.”

Then they vanished into strata unseen, Thav with them.

Sura—no longer Sura—awoke elsewhere. Not in paradise but a field. A field of boundless sky and flickering structures, where temples become brothels, where dancers lecture and monks seduce. Here, beyond form, there are no binaries, no punishments, no prizes. 

Just desire, clarifying.

Now, in the undifferentiated field of becoming, Sura wanders. They became no one and everybody. No mere brother, no mere human. Only a multiplying process of unraveling thought, unsettled, unfastened from guilt and shame, lust and blame.

In the end, as in the beginning, the two brothers were not judged for what they did or did not do. They were revealed. Helplessly, they suffered revelation and became the space where vice and virtue continually collapse into a hidden third terrain. They became a body without organs. They became the logic of rain.