A Calling in the Wind

Mira’s silky black hair was braided back the way her mother used to do it for her when she was a little girl living in Mexico. Around her face a few stray wisps of feathered hair danced in the breeze caressing her cheeks, a gentle stroke from an invisible hand. Determined to keep her eyes on the page and avoid any distracting daydreams, Mira tucked the loose strands of hair behind her ears and turned the page to the U.S. history book she was reading. 

It had been a long winter and finals would soon begin. Mira worked diligently, quickly scanning the pages of her book, making highlights, and writing notes in the margins all the while feeling insecure, as though no amount of studying would ever be enough. She was worried about the upcoming exams. This was her last year in college and there was no room for error. One more spring quarter and she’d be done, the rest of her life waiting mysteriously beyond that time frame. 

The problem was she still hadn’t decided what she would do after college. Time was running out and she felt the pressure of living up to everyone’s expectations. Or better said, she had the sensation that she was already letting everyone down. She felt like an imposter and had a deep sense of inadequacy because many of her classmates seemed so clear-eyed about their plans for the future and she by contrast was so unsure. 

How could she know which path would suit her? 

As a history major, she could branch out in so many different and exciting directions. She could work in law, education, government, art, or journalism. She was sure there were other possibilities she hadn’t yet considered. Even so, sitting in the middle of the grassy field she was in, she couldn’t say with any real conviction that she really wanted any of these things and she worried this meant she had come this far only to fall flat. 

Mira felt the coldness of the still winter air and chills ran through her body. She pulled the sides of her cardigan sweater together and crossed her arms over her chest. Thankfully it was sunny enough this early March day and she was happy for the chance to lay out under the clear sky and study at one of the many lawns across her college campus. It was a much needed escape from the suffocating room she had been stuck in. Out here at least she could breathe a little easier, see beyond the walls and screens around her, look out to the natural world and hopefully have the calming breeze tame the raging storm that brewed inside her.

The cool breeze picked up ruffling the little clovers in the field. The strands of hair behind her ears came loose again and gently tickled her face. Mira smiled at the sensation and became distracted from her reading and the spiraling thoughts and feelings she was trying hard to avoid. She indulged this playful moment, a break from her work, and savored the temporary joy it gave her. But it was all too brief a moment because, like all her good times, it was quickly clouded by the recollection that always loomed around her, the need for what was missing – her mother. 

Mira’s muscles tensed and a pang shot across her chest.  

She wished her mother could have seen what had become of her, that twiggy little girl she sent off to live with her sister in California. The pain from the memories overwhelmed her. Mira exhaled slowly trying to ease the swell of emotions that surged within her. She breathed in counting to ten, trying to concentrate on the numbers rather than her feelings but could swear she could smell her mother’s scent in the air. The same smell she remembered when, not wanting to let go, she had buried her face deep into her mother’s chest the last time she saw her.  They didn’t know then when they would meet again. 

Never. 

Two months after Mira left, her mother was killed. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, buying food at the market during a shoot-out that broke out suddenly. 

Mira’s eyes welled up with tears, triggered by the touch from the breeze that made her remember and miss her mother. It was a feeling that like the air itself was always there. Her mother’s death, a now silent and invisible fact of her past, had destroyed her world and shaped her into who she had become. 

Mira sat still, holding the book in her hands, her eyes closed and turned to the sky as if in prayer and in that moment her mother’s voice came to her across time and space, across the thread of life and dimensions of the universe, in a second breeze stronger than the first. 

“I will always love you.”

Mira pulled the book to her heart and held it there in a tight embrace she wished she could give her mother. How she needed her, yearned for her guidance in this important time of her life. She lay the book down again on her lap, her eyes resting on the pages that detailed U.S history and thought about the circular nature of her academic life. This was all information she had learned, to a lesser extent, in high school. Events she now studied in a more nuanced light. It was history, sure, things some people might overlook and say were over and done with, but it wasn’t so. The importance of the past boomed throughout time, created what our present has become. 

Mira closed the book.

Her mother would always be with her. Like the shaping events in the pages of her history book, Mira understood her story, her past, was her weakness but it was also her strength. Her mother was dead in the flesh but her memory, her spirit lived on in her, through her. 

Uncertainty and fear about what was to come fell, and in that moment, Mira knew what path her future should take. Her mother’s death, her sacrifice to send her daughter to America would not be in vain. Mira knew this now and she thanked her lucky stars that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.  

Yes, her college life was ending, but her life was just beginning and though her past was marked with sorrow she knew it wasn’t what her future held. She wasn’t a victim of circumstance, a helpless girl caught in a crucible of pain and suffering. She had power and choice. The future was hers to do with as she wished and no matter what path she followed she understood now that it would be what was meant to be. 

She didn’t need to worry about significance or status, fret about what other people thought or consider whether what she did hereafter would matter because the truth was it all mattered. Her mother, her ancestors, and all the people that came before throughout history had an influence on her, and like them she too would, in the end, leave her mark on the world because we all do like the invisible winds that swirl around our planet, we too are a force of nature that together through the passage of time shape what the world becomes. 

She knew she was free like the wind, that powerful wonderous thing that gently caresses the clovers in the field one moment and shapes landscapes, carves mountains, shifts sand dunes in the next.