The Wind In July

 A fierce wind has started to blow outside my window. I know her very well. I wait for her every year until after the first rains. And then I become impatient. For that is when she comes billowing with rage. I have known her for a long time now. And in spite of her ferocious nature, I look forward to meeting her. She destroys everything in her path uprooting the weak and flinging away the old. She is after all the harbinger of the new. She is a force that I can never forget. 

When I go to sleep, she whistles through the window panes, they rattle as she makes her way through. The curtain turns into a balloon almost as if hiding an entire person behind its concave shape. Sometimes I think she appears as a person and vanishes soon after. Leaving the curtain rustling, almost as if it were breathing with the lungs of a drowning man. Desperate to live but condemned to death. But then she returns and breathes a new life into him. Resurrects him. Just as she blesses the parched earth upon her arrival. 

Her arrival makes me sit up and take notice of the world outside my window. The window to the world of concrete, vehicles and the occasional oriole in the last remaining trees. But more than anything, I yearn for her violent nature, enduring the scorching, the oppressive heat of May, all in her anticipation. She does not stay for long usually, sometimes only for a week but that is enough for my annual sustenance.

But on some nights, like tonight, when the world has gone to bed and the phones have stopped ringing, I step out into the open to face her. They say she is dangerous, I know it and yet I dare to take the leap. And when I do, she makes her presence felt unabashedly. She runs through my hair and smothers my face, ringing sharply in my ears. She gallops and takes me with her. I lose myself in the moment, in the vortex of her fury. Would she take me away with her or lift me and throw me off to the ground like a dried leaf in her way. I let go and start to rise above the ground with her.