Wind

It takes me a moment to realise it is the wind that has woken me from sleep.

It is not yet heavy. It is just stirring in the tell-tale way, telling the tale of something stronger coming.

I lay and listen as the house creaks. Its creaks are coaxing the wind on. They say:

Give me all you got!

Within minutes, the real wind has arrived. The window is only open a few inches. Not wide enough to let enough of the wind in at once. It creates a bottleneck of air that pours itself forcefully through the little opening.

The weight of the air and its wildness seems to have startled the house into silence. The creaking taunts stop, uncertain of what they have done. For a moment, all that can be heard is the wind and its urgent rushing as it whistles in through the window, over our blanketed bodies and away down the hall.

The bedroom door slams shut with a crack. It is a sharp, sudden noise in its shape and sound, and though it takes me by surprise I do not jolt. The force of the slam has just as suddenly become absorbed, added to the force of the wind as it moves purposefully on. It is through this method of collecting all it moves, that the wind grows stronger, wilder and wider.

I am still. I am hardly breathing at all. This is a skill of mine. I am able to exercise it best when I am lying in bed, because I understand exactly how large a breath is required before the air in my lungs is made too heavy by the weight of the room and its contents. The dust on the dresser, the dirt on our slippers, the lint on the shirt draped across the chair in the corner. My wife lies beside me, snoring gently. Her breathing is the steady kind of a body in deep asleep. I observe the warm weight of the air which she breathes out. It is tangy, a bit sour and wet. It is at its wettest in these late (or early) hours, when she is drawing it from the deepest parts of her. It may be that I love her but I do not want her air to mix with mine too much, in so far as it can be helped.

This wind though does not allow for any of my usual caution to be taken. It simply moves too quickly; taking ahold of her breath and mine and mixing them into one single breath that it carries away on its blustering path. It is as if we are laying in a river of air. The weight of our breath is swiftly carried on, and with it all the weight of all the objects in our room. The arms of shirt which rest on the chair lift slightly, as if growing lighter. At the same time as the room is emptying, it is also filling, and these actions occur in equal measure. The air which enters the room is busy and heavy with the weight of many other things. In it are the sounds of innumerable slamming doors and the wet breaths of other peoples sleeping spouses. They have been carried far across dust filled fields to swirl dizzily through this bedroom. I begin to feel a little fizzy, as if my body were an aspirin and the room is filling with water.

I am lying very still, so that I do not have to breathe very much at all. The fizziness becomes also dizziness as I grow light-headed from too-little air. I am wary of this air which moves too fast for me to determine its weight or taste, and therefore also of the correct amount to take in. Lying here though, I know I will gave to get up soon and close the window. It is an inevitable fact that my dizzy brain seems to want to cling to, despite my dissolving body desiring to do no such thing. Amongst the other information it carries, the wind says also this: Rain is coming. I imagine my wife rising in the morning to see the open window and a sodden room and the mere imagining of her anger towards me seems to make my skin dissolve even quicker. I must close the window while I still possess enough solid body to do so.

The sound of the coming rain carries through the air like lots of little bells. As if several cats with collars on are running through the night outside, padding lightly upon the dry earth and leaving it wet in their wake. It is a pleasant sound, and were I in a different situation I would like to keep on lying here and listening to it. But were I in a different situation right now, the coming rain and its perfect chorus of small bells would also be in another situation, and I would not be lying here listening to it. So.

I draw in one short sharp breath to create an outline of a body again. I draw my skin back into itself. Then, suddenly, I am out of bed and over by the window in a single swift motion. The sound of my body moving is so quick it is silent. Its motion is weightless. If my wife were awake she would have been amazed to see me move with all the certainty of a slamming door. She is often urging me to move faster through the world. Though I do want to appease her by keeping pace, even the words with which she asks me to speed up come through too quickly for me to catch. Instead, I often find myself needing to ask that she repeat her request as I did not quite hear her. This seems to only make her louder and faster and more difficult to understand. In this way, the situation slips ever quicker out of my grip. I have grown increasingly used to the sight of her back as she walks several paces ahead of me, her shoulders in their yellow coat hunched against the wind and her head bobbing in time with her step.

I am standing by the open window and for a moment I’ve forgotten why. I am aware that I am swaying slightly. The wind is strong and my body feels very light. Just as suddenly as I became a door-slamming, I have un-become it and I am once again a body with its outline dissolving. The wind is unrelenting in its heaviness. There is an urgency to it that I am trying to understand. It reminds me of the speech of my wive when it doesn’t quite reach me. I find myself standing in front of an open window and wind is rushing all around me. I go inside to find the weight of the air in my body and there is nothing, my body is empty of air and yet there is only air all around me. Maybe I have forgotten? Maybe I have made a mistake and it is my body that is full of air, and the room and the window and the world are empty of it. It is all inside and out. There is an urgency to it, to the emptiness, that I understand. I need to let the air out, to give it back to the empty world and fill it up again.

I feel my mouth open. My jaw drops wide, and the outside and inside air are one river moving in every direction. The world is full of dancing air and the sound of small bells. Cats with silver paws are bounding through the window and I am a laugh so loud it is silent. The wind pours out of me and through me and I am it and there is no more urgency in anything as I am pulled back by my toes, out of the bedroom, through the front door and away into the night. When my wife is woken from sleep by the cold weight of the wet blanket clinging to her skin, I am already far away.