And if it rains a closed car at four

RE: title, I wish. We got caught in the rain again, this time during “naptime”— the tea-colored afternoon hour when our minds go thick with drowse, because our bodies remember being stateside and asleep. Except this time the sky was storm-colored. I was walking with Winnie down the Korean apparel street by the Dingxi metro station, rifling through racks of cheap satin. The eaves of the little clothing stores and the foreign-goods markets hocking ramen and seaweed let us walk on unharassed by water. My shoes didn’t fill up this time with little puddles of rain.

At a food court we stopped by for a late lunch or early dinner of bibimbap. At noon we’d eaten at a food festival, taking toothpick samples of kimchi and spiced fruits before sitting down with green papaya salads and a herb-dipped vanilla waffle cone, knocking elbows with local tourists who asked us what we were eating.

Today I did nothing but eat and walk. In the evening we ended up by the Taipei City Hall, walked over the glass spire of Taipei 101, following blindly the beacon of its height. Inside, surrounded by bright storefronts and glossy stone, I felt like myself again, a suburban mallrat. The tower’s proportions means the height isn’t overpowering. I felt more overwhelmed, I think, trying to shop the Houston Galleria in high school.

That’s probably because we were so tired there was no pressure to be purposeful, clever either as consumers or as tourists. Instead of paying for the observatory tour, we sat down on mall benches, then continued sitting over dessert. I giggled over my bowl of brown sugar and ice, drawn up the syrupy energy when it melted to honey-colored slush. On the walk back to the metro station, we sang to keep ourselves moving.