Every now and then, there's a stiff wind...the kind that can measure rooms with its cavernous roar. It knocks you senseless sometimes, even though you have both feet dug in, and your hands are firmly anchored to the railing of your stone wall.
I had some crayons once. So many beautiful colors, and with them I drew love that birthed rosy cheeked children walking bushy tailed dogs. I drew a life line that traveled down my plump young hand and into a crepe paper version of itself with an arthritic knuckle.
I thought I had the tools.
My fingers are cold. They make a play for pockets that are full of snotty tissues and fumble there with the tattered remnants of a memory seam or two. The surface of my skin ripples like the sea and I can only guess where time has gone. The wind. The wind took it. You see I forget that there is a breezeway as big around as the mighty oak that once held a tire swing. I forget that the creaking isn't the sweet melody of child's play, but the rattle of space inside my soul. There are things that are missing. Things that have always been missing. Things as fundamental as a mother, and a father. It takes a while to realize why there's always a breeze.
Every now and then, there's a stiff wind...the kind that throws up a mirror to your parlor tricks and illustrates the backstitch of an illusion. My crayons had no box, no structured frame with a cylindrical opening to whittle them into fine points. They just wore down with my scribbles and kept on going.
I have a sense now, of what I might have done if only I could have sharpened my tools and filled in the hollow where air escapes.
I might have caught my breath.
Every now and then, something howls through a void you forgot you had, maybe didn't even know you had, and it rocks you with legitimacy. I'm not placing blame. I'm just giving a structure of compassion to the wind.
