The silence after the rain stops is always too loud

It’s 2:37 PM, and the city just exhaled. The rain that fell for an hour like someone trying to wash the sky clean has stopped mid-sentence. Now the pavement steams, and the air smells like wet concrete and old paper — not unpleasant, just heavy with what wasn’t said. I’m sitting on my fire escape with a mug of tea gone cold, watching a pigeon test the damp edge of a newspaper. It’s not beautiful. It’s not even meaningful. But it’s real. And right now, that’s enough.