The Wind

She used to think she hated the wind. The way the sound of it scoured the back of her mind like sand as she tried to dream. Filling her sleep with sighing. Shifting the tide of her blood until it slopped and foamed like sea spume inside her.

She should have known it for the premonition it was. That way she’d have been ready.

Instead she became a stranger to her own body when it happened. Strength draining like water through a crack in a bowl. She imagined it leaving her to seek out someone better. Someone who could make something with it. Worthy in some way she had apparently not been.

She wondered who. She wondered how.

Until one day she understood Hope had abandoned her too—clasping hands with Health as they fled away—and the future, once a rainbow city on the horizon, became a scouring wind of its own. Filled with sand the colour of bone.

And, eventually, a voice.

A whisper, then a sigh. Then a song.

When it became a scream, she followed it. Away from home and up, through bowing trees that shed their leaves like the tears she had never cried. With path stones pressing through the soles of her shoes, and the voice like a grey thread she ran through her fingers. As Theseus did once, in his labyrinth.

Until she came to a hill of thrashing grass under bruised and bleeding sunset sky.

Higher than everything around her. Higher than the tops of the trees that cried on her behalf. And there she rooted herself.

The wind licked the salt sweat from her skin. Devoured the words as she cried out that she was there; it had told her to come, and she was there.

When she raised her arm into it, she wasn’t surprised the wind began to bite at her. That her skin began to flake away like ancient paint dried brittle by the sun. She watched herself dissolve into the air. Drifting, as dandelion seeds do. Grateful, and relieved. With a feeling like going home.