A few nights back, we couldn’t sleep. We were lounging around at 11:30 pm, and decided rather than watching yet another movie, we were going to go out. Our neighbourhood that we’re staying in isn’t far from one of the biggest parks in the city, so we decided that we’d walk to the park, and back.

45 mins there, 45 mins back. Easy peasy.

Before we left, we checked the weather – and the forecast called for light rain for the following four hours. Looking outside and seeing how light the rain was, we figured we’d be fine. The type of rain that was falling was like a ‘misting’ from the sky. Just enough to make the air crisp, but not enough to cause issue.

So we left.

As we crossed the bridge towards the park, the rain started to pick up. But me, I’m from Vancouver – a little rain never hurt me. So I said ‘let’s keep going’. He, thinking I was crazy, agreed anyway. I’ve noticed he does that for me a lot – even when he thinks I’m wrong, or that I’m offering a bad idea, he’ll go along with it because he likes to make sure I’m happy.

A few blocks from the park, we started to notice lightning. I don’t like lightning. It’s something that’s always given me a great deal of fear. With every lightning strike, I would jump.

“We’re under the trees, it’s going to be totally okay”, he said. He held my left hand as the rain poured down on us, and we continued on. Logically his words didn’t make sense, but honestly – he held my hand it felt like things were going to be just fine.

With both of us already soaked, and me saying “I should’ve brought the umbrella, I’m so sorry”, he laughed and kicked up some water from a puddle. “A little rain never hurt anyone”, he chuckled.

We reached the park and the rain picked up further. We decided to take a different, shorter, road back to the house, so it was both quicker, and we didn’t walk back the same way we came.

The lightning eventually cleared and it was just us, walking along in the rain at 12:30 at night. He looked over at me and saw that my glasses were all fogged up and covered with raindrops. He gestured for us to stop and he took them off my face, opening his sweatshirt to wipe them off on his semi-dry shirt underneath. He put them back on my face and said “We cannot have you wandering around not being able to see”. It was adorable.

By the time we reached the bridge, a torrential downpour had started. There were rivers forming on the pavement where the grooves from endless tires/traffic had driven. While previously it was just our outer layers that were wet, it took about 30 seconds to soak my t-shirt, my bra, and my everything I was wearing. I felt like I weighed ten pounds more because of the water.

We took shelter in a bus terminal near the end of the bridge, though I don’t know why because we were both so soaked, it really didn’t matter. Laughing at each other over how ridiculous our late-night walk had become, I again said “I’m so sorry I didn’t bring the umbrella”.

He pulled me in close, held me in his arms and said “Stop apologizing. There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be right now” and he kissed me. In the bus shelter, as the rain poured down around us. “Are you cold”, he asked. “We’re so close to home but with it raining this bad, I think he should get an Uber”. I told him the $15 Uber fee wasn’t worth it for how close we were, and that I believed he could make it, if we just ran. “You want to run, in this?” He laughed.

“3…2…1… Let’s go”. We took off from the bus shelter booking it home in the rain. He’s much taller than I am, and much more fit than I am, and could’ve easily run twice the speed as me, but he didn’t. He ran alongside me the whole way.

We made it home from what was the worst late-night walk of all time, peeled off our clothes, and crawled into bed in this tiny apartment, listening to our clothes drip onto the floor all night long. It actually took three full days for them to fully dry because they were just that wet.

You know… when it was happening it didn’t seem like it was that special. It just seemed like a good idea, turned into a catastrophic one. But looking back on it, the memory sits in my brain like one of those cheesy scenes from the chick-flick movies I love to watch so much. Caught in a bus shelter in the middle of a torrential downpour at 1:00 in he morning, where he kisses me and feeds me a line about not wanting to be anywhere else on earth? How cliche can it possibly sound? How cliche could it possibly get?

It’s pretty cute to think back on now. That night my life was a chick-flick movie moment. Pretty darn cute.

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