I wrote a thing.

                The signs are all the same—“Open” in big red letters, wrapped in blue neon. Some flash; others don’t. It’s raining, and the sidewalks are nearly empty save for a few soggy pedestrians with black hoods pulled snugly over their heads and arms wrapped tight around their bodies. It’s raining, and it’s not at all romantic. It’s nothing like Gil Pender’s Paris in the rain, where lovers walk intertwined in the mist—it’s nothing like that at all. There is no romance here. “Paris in the rain”—say it out loud. It slips out sibilantly—an elegant, mist-dusted, stone-paved city. Now say “Albany in the rain.” It’s clumsy-sounding: a muddy little town with teens in hoodies huddled underneath awnings, and empty sidewalks with gutters that always flood.

That’s all it is, really; the sidewalks empty and the glow of headlights hangs in the mist for a moment, and that’s Albany in the rain. The mystique expected of a city in the rain is not here. Is it the rain that’s deficient, or the town? I’ve been trained to believe that Paris in the rain is romantic—is it because once upon a time Fitzgerald and Antoinette and Hemingway once walked its streets? Is it because we imagine the Parisians do not mind if they get a little wet and embrace the rain instead of shrinking beneath umbrellas and big black coats? Maybe it is all of these things and more. Perhaps there is a love for the beauty of gray skies and the shimmer of raindrop-shining streets that Albany doesn't understand. Perhaps the glittering expanse of the Eiffel Tower and the quiet reassurance of the stone-paved streets lend an aura of elegance to Paris in any weather that Albany can never hope to match.

                But Albany in the rain is home. Albany in the rain is tilting my head back so that all I see are endless gray skies until I’m blinded by the raindrops. It’s the drumming of the rain on my umbrella. It’s the misty glow of streetlamps and the soggy crystalline leaves dangling from the trees. It's rain in June and summer sun in February. It’s elegant in its own way, and though it will never equal the grandeur of Paris, it’s home.