Rain.

This morning while I was waiting for #64, I got very wet. A shivering forty-minute busride later, I felt that my clothes had almost dried up again, and I was very happy about that. At least my shirt wasn’t see-through anymore.

I entered my workplace and worked.

At 12 when it was time for lunch, it was raining cats and dogs outside. I stepped out the door and got absolutely soaked immediately. As I was dodging my way through myriads of umbrellas to get to the foodplace, I could feel water running down my forehead, and I knew that my shirt was going to be transparent again. One time I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head. Someone had got me with his umbrella without even noticing it.

“Need one?”  a dude in the middle of the road asked me, handing me an umbrella out of a basket. He was using one for himself as well, staying dry and demonstrating the purpose of the product at the same time.

“Men don’t use umbrellas.” I told him.

He looked at me surprised.

When I was back from lunch, my friend Minye scolded me: “Are you really this stupid??” she wanted to know.

I said yes.

When I got home from work and it was already dark, I had gotten soaked again. The same raindrops, the same transparent shirt, the same shivering, the same manliness. I was starting to get bored with it.

“Oh, it’s you, the man who doesn’t use an umbrella!” The shopkeeper laughed when I came into her store, looking for muffins while leaving little puddles of water everywhere I went.

“Men don’t use umbrellas!” I told her, but she just shook her head and laughed: “You have said so before! And I still don’t think it makes any sense!”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re gonna get a cold tomorrow!”

“Men don’t get a cold!”

There was a pause, and then the shopkeeper spoke, slowly and carefully: “Listen, there are no iron people – everybody can get a cold.”

She was looking at me as though I really didn’t know.