At dawn, the clouds were thin and fast, stretched out like breath held too long.
Maya woke to them. Her chest felt tight, like it had all night — that quiet, clenched ache that comes after you’ve cried yourself to sleep. She sat on the balcony and matched her breathing to the way the clouds moved: in, slow, when they drifted left; out, slower, when they thinned out. Her heart, which had been racing for no reason at 3 AM, started to listen. It slowed. Not fixed, just…noticed.
By late afternoon, the clouds were low and heavy, sitting on the rooftops like a weight.
That’s how her body felt too. Heavy legs, heavy eyes, that leaden fatigue that isn’t from work but from carrying a thought you can’t put down. She walked to the park bench and didn’t talk to anyone. The clouds didn’t ask her to. They just hung there, giving her permission to be slow, to let her shoulders drop an inch. Her breathing got shallow when she was tense; watching them move made it go deeper without her trying.
They rolled in fast, dark, pressing the air down until her ears popped. The first drop hit her hand and she realized she’d been holding her breath. Rain on skin, cool and sudden, and something in her chest released. It wasn’t crying, not exactly. It was the physiological exhale she’d been avoiding all day — the drop in cortisol, the unclenching of muscles she didn’t know were tight. The rain blurred the city, and for ten minutes, her nervous system didn’t have to keep scanning for threats. It could just feel wet, and cold, and real.
When the clouds cleared at night, the sky was clean and quiet.
Her heartbeat was too.
The sky never said anything. But it learned her rhythm, and for a while, she learned it back.
