NO RAIN, MAN
- Feb 14
- 1 min read
By Heath Sutherland
Walls closed midnight velvet. Doctors seared brands into my skin - depression, anxiety, psychosis —
The true word “autism” slept coiled in my marrow, a black rose waiting for its century to bloom.
I was the boy who “saw” music and cried too soon:
Jeff Wayne’s synths exploding violet galaxies,
Meatloaf’s bleeding crimson thunder,
each note a living shape only my skull could cradle.
Beauty inside the looping torment that later tried to drown me.
I learned the world through bruises —
a teacher’s boot, a red-goatee grin,
fists raining on a child’s face while the pine stank of rot.
Yet even there, geometry sang:
the perfect arc of a homemade bat finding its mark.
Water parted for me in silver equations,
javelin carved sky on invisible graphs,
clay targets burst into pink constellations,
before my finger kissed the trigger.
I ran faster than the lies they told,
threw farther than their small imaginations,
swam deeper than their diagnoses.
They called it failure. I call it the forge.
In every shutdown, a palace of silence.
In every meltdown, a supernova thought.
In every mask fused to bone, a pearl grown from grit.
The darkness never empty — it was a womb, night ocean.
I burn out entirely, a phoenix too autistic to die quietly.
And from the ash I rise, still seeing music in colour,
still hearing the low, steady drum of my own unbreakable rhythm.
No rain, man — only the storm that taught me,
how fiercely beautiful a different mind can burn.