The smell of the wind is what means the most to me. You know, that special wind that kicks up when there's electricity in the air on a warm summer night. It's almost as though a thunderstorm could happen at any moment, but it never does, so all of this power is trapped within the atmosphere, and as you inhale the static-charged air, you can feel it surging through you. It's like an orgasm just welling up inside of you, but somehow it feels so incredibly good that you never quite want to let it go. You hold on to it, grasping at it, letting it fill you up with this intense, glorious sensation that you know will be lost should you let it take over you. Yeah, that's the kind of wind I mean.
This wind blows the leaves around, and shuttles the garbage on the streets from one gutter to another, and it makes the blades of grass happily flutter to and fro. It blows your hair into your eyes, and it most naughtily lifts up your skirt as it molests your warm skin with its sneaky little tentacles. It's just wind after all, so you'd never once think it had a hidden agenda, but I assure you that it most certainly does. It seduces you with its delightful smile, luring you like a siren on the shore. This wind that brings promise and change and guides you back to the days that you look most fondly upon more than anything. When you were young and fresh and lived so carefree. Everything was new to your fledgling eyes, so the world was rose tinted and endless. There was no set road in front of you, and the road that is behind you simply vanishes off into the distance, because when that wind is around, no pain or humility matters much. It's all about what could be, and not at all about was has already been.
The wind means more to me now than maybe it did in the past. Back then it was all about change and freedom and adventure. Nowadays, as I am much older and perhaps jaded and bitter, when that wind rears its lovely head, it quickly brings me back to who I was before all of the years piled on and smothered me. I am stripped of the baggage and the poor choices and lousy boyfriends. The crummy apartments and broken down cars, and terrible jobs that I hated with the fury of a thousand fire-breathing dragons. The despair of adulthood that bogs you down and makes you feel like you will never be anything that you dreamt about because well, it's simply too late now, right? But that wind... that sneaky, mischievous wind, injects you with hope once again the instant it crosses your path.
"All is not lost," it whispers. "I am still here, just as I've always been. It is not I that have lost you; it is you that have lost I, but I have been here all along. Just step out of yourself every now and then and you will once again be filled with joy and hope and my neverending promise to remind you of who you have always been beneath the layers and layers of burdens and responsibility."
This wind, and only this one in particular, is the one that gently nudges us through the chill of winter and the brutal cold within ourselves. It is indeed the most important wind of all. I keep thinking about how these days are sadly numbered and truly, it's now or never. I am breathing in all that the warm, electric air has to offer. Storing it up within myself so that I may lean on it when I need it most. When I'm bundled up from head to toe with sadness and mittens and scarves and melancholy, I'll put a fan in front of my heater and close my eyes so that the warm air may blow on me and allow me to remember the wind, for it is still there even when it seems as though it is not...
