The air is balmy, wet even, and I can only just start to hear the lightest raindrops hitting the leaves and awning above my head. As the water slowly trickles down and seeps into the dirt, I start to smell the rain, “there’s a word for that” I think, but I can’t remember it. I hear tires crunching gravel as Tyler’s old Volvo 240 rolls over the hill and lights up the rain for a second before he cuts off the headlights

Tyler steps onto our screened-in porch, letting the door behind him close loudly, tosses his keys on the table and flops down on the porch swing beside me. We sit in silence for a few minutes, him breathing heavily, and me watching his breath in the cold.

“Do you know the word for the smell when rain hits the ground?”

“I thought about crashing my car on the way home again” Tyler blurts at the same time I ask my question

“What?”

“I thought about crashing the car on the way home again, just veering to the right or left into a tree or something” he continues. I can see this is something he needs to talk about.

 I try to approach delicately “What made you think of that?”

“Nothing, I don’t think. I don’t know honestly. I just see the tree and have this compulsion to steer into it. I just feel like it would be relieving I guess.”

“To crash your car?” I can hear my tone getting harsher

 He closes off at my tone change. “Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

I look out at the rain coming down, each drop briefly highlighted by the porch lights just to disappear into the darkness and out of sight again.

Tyler stays quiet, the two of us are staring out into the darkness, just hearing and smelling the rain. For the first time since he sat down, he looks at me. “Petrichor,” he says and takes a deep breath in through his nose, “the smell of rain when it hits the ground”.