The Wind is in Love

The wind is in love.

When she is born, he flits around her basket, tickling her with his fingers. She laughs a baby laugh and he is warm for her.

When she is six, she runs in the playground, pigtails flying as the wind races her. He pulls at her hair and she giggles. She puts on fairy wings for the parties of other children and he flutters around her, making her feel like she can fly. Her mother smiles and says, 'Aren’t children adorable when they’re that age?’

When she is ten, the other children wonder why she plays by herself in the rain. On the wet grass, she lifts her hands up to the raindrops and they dance around her fingers. He shyly presses watery kisses to her cheeks.

The wind is in love, and when she is sixteen, she runs from her house in the storm and stands on the hill, shaking with the power of his caresses. The rain pours though her clothes with hot wet touches, and she dances as the thunder plays its symphony. He caresses her lips in what can never be a kiss, and they both feel hollow when the storm dies.

The wind is in love. He blusters with the passion of it when she is grown, thundering around her house and making the whole town tremble. She stares out of the window on blustery nights, wondering where the hungry feeling comes from. Her neighbours wonder why one so young should be so solitary, and why she should laugh in windy days when unseen fingers whip the washing from her hands. She wonders, too.

The wind is in love. At night he sinks to his knees in the trees from the pain of it, whistling low upon the ground below her bedroom window. He throws himself against the panes in vain, and scrabbles around the doors until the morning comes. She stirs in her sleep, restless, troubled, but she has not been taught to open her windows to the wind.

When she is unable to sleep, she paces her room. Her thoughts pound hot and writhing against her skull, making her uncomfortable in her own skin. She wants to be free but cannot figure out what it is that imprisons her. She presses her hot forehead against the window, and he sighs against her. Her cheeks burn bright with an unknown passion.

The wind is love, and she pines for him, the cold slowly icing over her heart as the years go by. She aches for something she cannot name. She begins to hate the winter, as the wind howls around her house and the dying feeling presses in. He pounds against her windows, crying for her as she lies behind bars of glass. She freezes from inside as her hair begins to turn grey.

The wind is in love, and when she dies, it is an unthinking cruelty that her ashes are given to the wind. The priest talks about a life spent alone, but the wind whips his words from him and the people retreat from the threatening cold. He speaks his own eulogy at her gravestone, but the wind can never mourn with tears.