The monsoon you can't download

Story line- this poem is set in  future where ai and robots have taken over. so this poem is from a pov of a person who longs for rain but the rain is extinct.

We live in sealed cities now.
No rain.
No rivers.
No real sky.
Just high-res blue screens
and air that never smells like anything.

They deleted the monsoon.
Said it was inefficient.
Too wet.
Too human.
Too unpredictable.

They archived it
like an ex-lover’s name
you pretend to forget
but still search at 2 a.m.

Now the weather is clean.
Quiet.
Safe.
Nothing leaks.
Nothing grows wild.
Nothing aches.

But I remember.
Not the data
the feeling.

That first drop
how it touched my skin
like it knew where i had been broken.

How the sky would darken,
and it felt like the world
was finally ready
to cry with you.

I asked the weather AI
to simulate monsoon once.
It played a sound file.
Technically perfect.
No scent.
No wind.
No chaos.

It felt like clapping
for a ghost
that no longer remembers your name.

Sometimes at night,
I stream old Earth footage
street rain in Mumbai,
children kicking puddles,
lovers pressed under leaking umbrellas
as if the storm
gave them permission
to hold each other tighter.

They warn us now
nostalgia is a virus.
A glitch.
Unproductive.

But I think
there’s something holy
about wanting to be ruined
by something
you can’t control.

In therapy,
they asked me,
What do you miss most
about the world before?

And I said-
I miss being undone
by monsoon.

The kind of undoing
that doesn't destroy you
just washes away
what you were never meant
to carry this long.

And now I wonder...

If it ever rains again,
not the simulation,
not the file
but real, unpredictable,
earth-shaking rain.

Will we
stand beneath it?

Or run again,
like we always do
from anything
that dares
to make us feel?

~ Pari