Warm Wind Blowing

I am walking home in Midsummer and the warmth in the evening wind is impossible. And where I cross at the intersection I’m hit with a precise mix of aroma, warmth, and humidity that stops me in my tracks. What was it the wind carried on it that day that it brings to me now, again? Eucalyptus, dirt, and something unplaceable. The smell is fading. Nevertheless, I am already seized by the wind and taken back to that day in Midsummer eight years ago. Though the time had become as remote to me as a day before my birth, it feels now as close as the warm air to my skin under the thin linen of my clothes.

That was the feeling that day and the feeling now: that Summer itself is manifest like a thick essence. Thoughts and feelings are saturated with it. It drips from words and bleeds from the overripe wind. On evenings like these, it can be drunk till you are full and sick—so vivid is the image of her before me now, of the time when in youth I drank deeply from Summer’s well and did not think on it.

She saw me first, I’m told. I had been crossing the bridge over the creek in the park. My hair was bleached orange and I was beautiful, she’d said later. While she was, I’d have to guess, crouched in some shady eucalyptus wood, whittling twigs or cutting flowers.

I didn’t see her until later at the festival, when a friend introduced us. She was her cousin, visiting for the Summer. I thought nothing until we shook hands and I felt in her touch something unnameable. Something in her regard, her attention, encompassing me like a wind, stunning but intangible. I opened my mouth to say my own name but no sound came. “I’m…” I’d said.

In her eyes, what I’d felt in her hand. An impossible warmth attending me. Though only our hands touched, I felt so close and exposed to her. She searched my face, her expression balancing on a razor’s edge between concern and amusement. Then it resolved to amusement, so subtly that I doubted at all whether there had been concern.

“And I’m…” she said, then opened her mouth silently as if to say a name and then closed it. Amusement dripped from her eyes like amber tears— frozen to this day in my mind, perfect and unchanged.

A laugh drew easily from my lips.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said. “Whoever you are.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said, some semblance of composure returning to me. I think this now and think to tell her this later but never do: “All of this has already been said before.” But even those words seemed thin and airy against the thickness of that Summer day. How strange it is then that airy words and thin wind become the carriers of memory, its delicate keepers, until it brings them back without warning on some random Summer day.

My memory of the conversation fails here, eclipsed by the feeling– our words snaked into the sky. We were two nameless things.

The three of us all ran through the festival. The day was thick with laughter and music– they clustered and bubbled like sea foam on a rising wave. We drank sweet wine and sat on a hillside under an oak’s shade while we cut flowers into garlands and put them in our hair. The whole time we spoke of nonsense. The words we three said to each other were like paper airplanes, like kites without strings, thrown to the wind as quickly as they were constructed. So abundant was our invention on that day that we did not think to keep anything, no schematics or maps or references. Still I keep memories in fragments, like the petals that litter the green ground once the festival has ended and everyone has gone home.

“..he went straight on and kept going. No one ever saw him again…”

“...the tree works wonders…”

“...a habit of mine. To eat these things…”

“...totally unrecognizable…”

Disjointed pieces divorced from their whole. I wonder if there is any virtue at all in being a chronicler, a collector of dead things. Why should I be the one to walk the empty fields when everyone else has moved on?

As the sun lowered and burnt the sky golden brown and the bonfires began, my friend– her cousin– went home and we both elected to stay. We ran to bring dead wood to the fires and we seemed to fly over the hills and the grass like frenzied spirits. Our forms were surely just as human as they were those of deer, bats, owls, pollen, warm updrafts rising. Our long shadows jumped in front of us and around us, animated by the twilight as if possessed by some will untamed and beyond the bodies that cast those shadows.

And each branch we fed to the fire we imbued with an ill or a fear of ours that would be burned and scattered with it. I asked her what ailments she had put in the fire to burn.

“I already forgot,” she said. “They’ve gone to the sky, away from me. Whatever problems I had are not my problems anymore.”

When I look on her face there is indeed not an etching of trouble, but there is a wistfulness.

“You seem almost sad to say that,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “I feel at peace, but many of my pains I had made friends of. We shared a body and a home, drank the same wine. An empty chair in your mind where once sat an enemy is still an empty chair, and it makes its emptiness known. And those who have learned to run shackled might feel unease in running freely. But unkind spirits wear the faces of friends. For a long time I wondered if it was okay to forget. I had no other friends. And now I am free, but I feel alone.”

“You’re not alone,” I say without thinking, the words flashing like sparks from my mouth. “I mean, I’m here… whoever I am.”

She laughs and the laugh is the world. I feel myself tumbling into the sky like smoke, rootless and elated. I watch her face and her colors in vividity before me, realer than real.

“What did you put in the fire to burn?” she says.

“I put my wallet and keys and my name. I’m going off the grid.”

She laughs again. In truth her laugh is a fire and I’m throwing in whatever I can to keep it burning. Then, still smiling, she asks me what I really put.

“I don’t know,” I say. Either I forgot or I didn’t know what to put. “Maybe I can’t distinguish acquaintance from adversary. I don’t know what anyone is. It’s a world of shadows, tricks of the light. Everything is appearance, and appearance shifts. The shadows on a face can make it seem in one moment benevolent, and then the fire flickers and the face looks evil. One moment I see a monster. Then it’s a pile of clothes.”

“Maybe the solution is to clean your room,” she says. “And buy a lamp.”

We both laugh. The night closes around us as we sit by the fire. She leans her head on my shoulder and this moment seems impossible and wavering like a flame itself, burning from an unknown source a fuel more furtive than oxygen. From where did this erupt? From the mind of which volatile god was this inspired? Was this flame lit with care or on a whim? If carefully, then to what end did that god envision it? If on a whim, then what’s stopping this flame from being extinguished as quickly as it was lit? When might the careless wind change direction? Are the most volatile fuels not the quickest to burn away?

In truth I thought little on all of this but the thoughts were all contained in the singular and delicate structure of that moment which I dared not shatter with even the lightest of questioning. I acted as though in a pleasant dream that’s poised to reject the dreamer and collapse the moment it’s thought on. When drinking from a well it is best not to think on its depth.

Though I wonder now if I should have thought more. Would I have found something more tangible and sturdy than I imagined to be there? Or would I have found nothing at all but airy hopes and empty thoughts?

Her hair smelled like eucalyptus and lemons– that was most of what I thought about then. And later it would smell like smoke, and she would go home and she might think of me, and she might shower or she might collapse from exhaustion, and she would dream in her sleep and wake up and eat breakfast and sit in a chair, and use a fork, and she would be wearing different clothes. That was what I thought on– intricate mundanities illuminated and profaned by her dwelling in them.

I don’t know if I did anything wrong. Or, to phrase it better, I don’t know if I could have done anything differently. I undoubtedly did something wrong, and maybe that was in doing nothing wrong. Do we not all desire our own exposition, to be uncovered? Was this newborn creature, clawing to be nursed with certainty, this thing I dare not even call love, perhaps slain by apprehension? Something impossible can never be. I don’t know what I’m saying. I think in circles over these memories until they are distorted beyond recognition.

I walked her home and we were close to each other the whole time, that much I know. I breathed her scent and she breathed mine, that much the gods were witness to. I stopped at her door and we said goodbye and she let go of my hand and then I let go of hers. That much still swirls insoluble in the wind somewhere, undefeated and invincible.

I’m still standing at the intersection in the warm evening, nearly doubled over from the force of the memory.

We saw each other again before she left but it was different. She was as warm as she had ever been, and we were close, but she was beyond me. Something mutable in her had coagulated into the certainty that this would not persist past the end of the Summer. I stood impotent to that certainty and all the tools at my disposal that I had once considered keen seemed like children’s toys in my hands, crude imitations of utility, half-chiseled stone tools blunted not even by use but by the incompetence of their construction– doomed creatures of ill-omened birth that never stood a chance in fulfilling whatever vague purpose had been set out for their use. I was a failed mother and a failed father and their wretched child; a world-eater; a mote of dust, a wandering comet, totally peripheral to anything of import. I watched her go and that was it.

The wind picks up again, stronger than before. It is insane and unruly, and there is not a hint of a bitter chill, no stark dryness– just the strength of its rushing and the sight and smell of all it upends. I keep walking.