Genre: Melancholic Romance + Subtle Fantasy
Life Phase: Late Teens
They first met under the same umbrella, in the nearly empty campus library, as rain poured down over the city. Her name was Alya. She liked to record the rain. Seriously—she actually wrote down every rainy day she had ever experienced, complete with the scent of earth, the sound of droplets, and the emotions that surfaced.
"Why?" asked Reno, a senior student drowning in thesis anxiety.
"Rain is... like a message from the sky," she replied. "Every rainfall brings something. Sometimes memories, sometimes warnings, sometimes... a meeting."
From that day on, they always sat together whenever it rained. There was never a confession of love, only shared laughter and faint embraces between stacks of books. But one day, Alya stopped coming. Rumors said she had moved away; others whispered she had fallen ill. Reno waited, writing rain notes just as Alya had taught him.
Then, on May 29th, the rain fell harder than ever. On the bench where they always sat, Reno found an old umbrella he had never seen before, with a small note tucked inside:
"If this is the last rain, let it be an embrace that doesn't leave us wet. I didn't truly leave. I just became the raindrops you hear."
Interesting Fact: The smell of rain is called petrichor, a mix of compounds from dry soil and bacteria. Scientifically, this scent is proven to evoke nostalgic and romantic emotions.
Philosophy: Sometimes the sincerest farewells are the ones never spoken. But they leave traces in the most ordinary things—like water, earth, and sky.
Strange Rumor: An old belief from Kalimantan says: if two people sit together during the first rain of May, and one of them is no longer present by the last rain, they have been "linked" beyond the mist—whether in life, or beyond it.