We are longing for the rain to return, pressing our palms against the cloudy pane and memorizing the way dust rivers itself through the yard. The porch boards creak with our weight, morning after morning, while the air cools but never quenches, always promising... never giving. Every night our voices twist into the ceiling beams, prayers sweet and sharp as honeysuckle, hope thrumming under our ribs, brittle as starlight.

There’s a photograph tacked above the stove, watered edges curling. It shows us in green. Grass up to our shins, shadows plump beneath a merciless sun. Still, we gather at dusk, counting the cracks in the cracked earth, inventing names for the shapes wandering in the distance, vague, shimmering, nearly real. We say, “Maybe tomorrow.” Every tomorrow slips slyly past.

We are longing for the world as it was, or maybe as it could be, if only the sky remembered us. Yet we stay, salt on our skin, hope blooming stubborn as wild morning glory along the fence. One afternoon, thunder stumbles beyond the horizon, shaky and uncertain, and for a moment, we believe. For a moment, we are more than our thirst.