Fire, Then Rain

We were on a ferry, crossing the bay. I was twenty-three, almost twenty-four. His eyes were the tide and I thought, with the complete conviction only someone that age can summon: forever.

It wasn’t forever. It was barely even real, in the ways that matter. But it felt enormous, and it felt like fire, and for a long time I let that feeling stand in for the truth.

It would take me more than a decade to understand that this wasn’t only a story about him. He was simply the first person who taught me a shape I would recognize again and again: what it felt like to love someone inside a box I didn’t build.

I met him a few days after a long relationship ended — the one I’ve written about before, the one that almost became a marriage. He was older than me, a professor, charismatic in a way that had nothing to do with looks and everything to do with attention. He noticed me. He was interesting. And he had power over me that I didn’t fully understand yet — the kind that comes from a title, from being the person who decides your grade, your recommendation, your opportunity to study somewhere extraordinary.

He took a group of us to London. It was the first time I’d ever really gone anywhere on my own, chosen a country, been transformed by distance. It was also confusing in ways I couldn’t name at the time. There were nights that blurred a line that should never have been blurry, moments where he said things like I know I shouldn’t, but I’m going to anyway — the kind of sentence that sounds romantic to a twenty-two-year-old and sounds like something else entirely once you’re older and have some distance.

I didn’t see it clearly then. I don’t think I was supposed to. That’s part of how these things work — they’re built to feel like a secret you’re both choosing, not a door only one of you is allowed to open.

He moved to California. I followed — or told myself I was choosing California for other reasons, which were also true, but weren’t the whole truth. I remember standing on a ferry in the bay with him and his mother, whom I’d grown fond of, trying to convince him and myself that San Francisco — the harder, less obvious choice — was where I belonged. It wasn’t about the city. It was about staying close to him.

The universe, as it turned out, had other plans. I didn’t get into the San Francisco school. I got into the one in Los Angeles instead — the one that actually became my life. I’ve written about that before, about waves and not fighting the current. I didn’t know at the time that not getting what I wanted was one of the better things that ever happened to me.

Years later, I watched from a distance as he got engaged to someone new — a student of his, in his department, who graduated and married him within what felt like days of each other. I wasn’t surprised, in the way you’re not surprised by a pattern once you finally have the vocabulary for it.

This wasn’t a singular, complicated, star-crossed love. It was a pattern of its own, and I had simply been one iteration of it.

Here’s the thing I didn’t understand for a long time: he was also one iteration of mine.

There have been musicians I loved from the audience who called me “friend” in a way that only existed inside a venue, never outside of it. There was a well-known producer whose whole world I orbited on his terms, never mine. There are people in my life right now — people I love deeply, soul-deep, people who matter enormously to me — where something has to stay intact for that love to keep existing at all. Sometimes that’s a boundary built to protect something good. Sometimes it’s a difference neither of us can compromise on, and shouldn’t have to.

I used to experience each of these as its own separate, isolated heartbreak. Writing this song was the first time I saw them as one continuous thread. The same shape, over and over, in different rooms, with different people: caring deeply about someone within a box I didn’t build and can’t fully open.

Some of those boxes exist for reasons I now respect completely. A friendship where we simply want different lives shouldn’t have to be sacrificed because the love inside it is real but limited by design. Those aren’t failures of love. Those are just its edges, and edges aren’t always a tragedy.

But some of those boxes were built by someone else’s power, not by mutual care — and I had to learn, slowly and expensively, how to tell the difference.

The day I learned, years later, that his marriage was ending — that was the day the lyrics arrived.

Not slowly. All at once, in the shower, of all the inconvenient places, mid-shampoo, a whole four minutes of it pouring out of me faster than I could hold onto it. I ran out dripping to record a voice memo before it disappeared. San Francisco. The power line. Loving loud. All of it arrived together, like it had been waiting for the right moment to finally get out.

But the song had actually entered my life months earlier.

It exists because of a gift and a good question, arriving at the same time as an old story finally closing a loop. It was given to me by someone I trust, months before I did anything with it. It sat, unfinished, until a friend asked how it was coming along — a small check-in that turned out to matter more than either of us knew. And then, almost immediately after, the news about the divorce arrived, and something in me that had been holding its breath for over a decade finally exhaled.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think some songs wait for you to be ready, and this one had been waiting a long time.

I wrote several versions of this song before landing on the one that exists now. An earlier draft was much more specific — specific enough to point at exact people, exact circumstances.

As I kept rewriting, I understood that specificity was actually working against the song. This wasn’t about one relationship. It was about the shape underneath all of them. So I widened it. I let the details soften into something closer to the truth of the pattern than the truth of any single story.

That’s also where “fire” became “rain.”

The early choruses all lived in fire — thunder, crashing, everything loud and consuming, which is exactly how it felt on that ferry, still in my early twenties.

But some of these loves are still in my life, quietly, exactly as they are, and they don’t need to become fire to be real. They just need to be honest about their own edges.

Rain is steady.

Rain doesn’t need to burn down a house to prove it’s real.

When it came time to choose the cover art, I thought about the ferry from the lyric — the one in the bay, the one that started all of this.

But I wasn’t going back to San Francisco to stand on it again.

Instead I thought of another ferry: the Staten Island ferry, which I used to take constantly during the one semester I lived in New York for college, back before that first attempt at leaving my hometown fell apart. That ferry meant Manhattan. It meant the life I wanted at eighteen, the one that didn’t work out.

I hadn’t been on it in seventeen years.

This summer, I went back and took the photos that became the cover.

There’s a version of me in some other timeline who stayed in New York and never left. I’ll never know what her life looks like. In its own way, that city has always been another almost-love of mine — one more “maybe in another life” I never got to live out, and don’t even want anymore, but still think about sometimes.

It felt right that the song’s cover would hold a different ferry than the one in its lyrics.

The pattern was never about just one bay, one person, one moment. It’s bigger than that. It always was.

I work with people now in a role that comes with its own kind of power — a container I’m responsible for holding carefully.

I think about this song every time I’m reminded of that responsibility. I know exactly what it costs someone when a person with power blurs a line and calls it romance.

I’m not going to be the reason anyone else has to write this song twenty years from now.

I know the pattern now. I can point to it, name its shape, recognize it walking toward me before it arrives.

That doesn’t mean every box in my life is a wound — some of them are just honest edges around real love, and I’ve made peace with that too. But I know the difference now between an edge that protects something good and a line that was drawn because someone had power over me and used it.

I stopped needing fire to prove it was love.

I know that clearly now.

Rain, it turns out, is enough.