I See the Wind Most Everywhere

It is a hot, moist, rattling wind that pulls me to awareness, there on my cheek, like a lover blowing into my ear. I know my eyes are open because I can feel myself blinking them. But the only light I see is when my eyes are closed and the little sprites of red and orange drift like clouds in a hopeless night sky.

I open my eyes again to the darkness and I cannot move. There is an uncomfortable cocoon around me that holds my arms and legs and torso in place. I cannot adjust my head. It is complete darkness and I am held fast by it. Intense panic is welling up in my belly, hot throbs of fear. I push against the darkness and am answered only with stiff pain, shocking pain, but that is only for my awareness to feel. Fueled by the panic of being trapped in total darkness, the deep core of my being compels me to kick and flail and scramble.

I can do none of that.

I am stuck, stuck in the dark, with nothing but my slamming heart and the red and orange clouds behind my eyes.

It is actually the pain that calms me down. Flexing, clenching my legs and back and arms seems to have stoked the pain I was only merely aware of. Now it has burned its way into the part of my mind that operates at the yes and no levels of decision-making. And this pain is a definite “no.” I stop flailing and force myself to breathe. In and out. In and out. Commanding the panic, setting it aside like a puzzle piece that I will come back to. I can clench my toes. The more I do, the more my legs come into focus. They feel wrong as my perception goes, since I can’t see or touch them. But I certainly can feel them. One is cocked upwards, as if mid stride, the other is cocked sideways, the toes send a riot of color behind my eyes as I realize that I am squeezing them closed tightly.

But I can at least clench my toes and that gives me some comfort. With that comes deeper breathing and new pain. There is something pushing my arms against my chest. Each breath taken too deeply highlights a spark of pain. I had broken a rib playing football in school, so I know that pain. And with that knowledge a dawn rises in the darkness that surrounds me. I am alive and I am trapped, buried? God I am buried alive.

The panic returns and I go to my arms and my hands, pinned against my chest, I can feel one hand wriggling uselessly on my sternum, pressed flat against whatever is pinning my chest. My left hand twitches and I feel it by my jaw. There is some looseness there and bits of detritus trickle down my neck.

I can open and close my jaw and this discovery is corroborated by my hand. I breathe deeply again and shift on the inhale. The fraction of an inch I move sends shock waves of pain through my legs, my hips, my chest and my right arm. I am shattered. The lucid part of me notes the path that the trickle of small bits take down my neck. It tells me I am lying on my back in absolute darkness. I am pinned, in immense pain, and there is nothing I can do about it.

Why am I here in this nowhere, crushed? What was the world like before this? Free, lit. I move my head and regret it immediately. Not only does my left cheek stop at my hand, then my right cheek on a cold, smooth surface, but the wracking pain that once shot through my body, legs-to-chest, now shoots down my body, shoulder to hips. I revert to my breathing, shuddering in the dark, and it comes to me. I was on my way to the three thirty stand-up with the development team when there was a bang and a shake. The floor dropped from under me and the lights went out. Earthquake? Terrorist? Did Frank in accounting finally flip? I laugh a little and it hurts. So I lie still, alone in the dark, off the hook for delivering that report out on the project. Another laugh and I feel the pain this time, but it is weirdly okay.

I push my body outward in the ways that don’t electrocute me with pain and try to feel for surfaces that make sense. There is definitely concrete on my chest and legs, its cold density pinning me down and twisting my frail frame with its solid will. I feel paper against my right cheek (probably that damn report), and really, that is all that makes sense. What is the stuff that has crumbled like dirt into the cracks between my elbows and my ribs? What can do this to a building?

My head is in a hollow and, as I settle my breathing again, I can hear sounds in the distance, water rushing, the occasional trickle of gravel. But otherwise, the silence envelopes me like the dark. Total, as if fighting against my eyes and ears.

I lie still and feel it again, that hot, moist rattling wind on my right ear.

It is a regular pulse of air, accompanied with a throaty rasp. I hold my breath. Waiting, and there it is again, a movement of air, warm and wet on my ear. A memory flashes through my mind, a movie theater, a whiff of perfume, my hair stands up on the next breath.

A breath! This is a person breathing on me.

I work my jaw up and down and almost bark: “Hello!?” Then wait, hold my breath in dark silence. A trickle of something falls through some unseen crevasse in the near distance.

Again, a hot press of air on my ear.

“Hello?” I practically beg. “Hello? I am here! Who--” I try to turn my head toward the breaths, but something stiff, but padded (A chair back? A cubical wall?) pins my head facing forward. A subtle shift in my position reminds me of my legs, hips, ribs, and arm. I cry out. I can’t help it. The panic returns. Each spasm of animal fear translated to waves of pain, like the tsunami after the quake.

“Earthquake!” I shout.

“Yessss,” the tickle of warm air on my ear. “Earthquake.” There is a pouty stop deep in a throat, delicate, like someone adjusting their weight on a bed to inch closer. “A big one too…” The words ease out of the speaker’s mouth, a woman’s mouth, riding a stream of breath.

“Who are you? Do I know you?” I am still jumpy—as jumpy as I can be in my coffin of collapsed office tower.

“Be sssstillll,” a gentle hiss. “You will only make it worse for yourself.” The warmth on my ear and neck spills down my jittery body like a swimmer diving through a thermocline. With every inch, my body calms, pushing the panic, the pain, and the shivering aside. I am still.

There is silence again and I am terrified that I am either hearing things or that this person will die and I will be alone again in the dark.

“Can you move?” I demand. Despite the advice, I try to role toward the sound, like a baby instinctually roles toward the breast.

Still and silent. No breath. I wait and wait.

Then again, like a tide rolling out, a swell of warm air fills the space around my ear and neck.

“Can you move?” I ask again.

“Shhhh,” the voice breathes. “I cannot move. And neither can you.” Tears well up in my eyes.

“It hurts so bad,” I cry. “I can’t move. I am stuck. It’s so dark and I don’t want to die in here.”

“Shhhhh,” again, the calming pulse of the sound pushes around my ear and down my neck, sending warmth through my body. “Be still. It will all be over soon. You just have to sit still and this will pass.” Again. “Shhhhh.” Another wave of calming warmth. “Do you remember when you were young? At church, or in kindergarten? Or maybe your mom sang this song to you?”

“Huh?” I wanted to be incredulous, but we are stuck in the dark rubble together and this is all, everything. “Sang to me? What song?”

“It’s called ‘I see the Wind,’” she explained.

“I do know that,” I cry out. “In Sunday school, we called it a finger play, or something like that. Each line…”

“Each line has a movement,” She finishes.

“Yes! Yes!” I could feel tears falling down my cheeks, clearing lanes through the dust as they fell away. “But how can I do the dancing if I can’t move?”

“Shhhh,” she chided, like the nuns. “I will sing it to you and you must think about the movement. This will help you pass the time.” I quieted and closed my eyes in the darkness, squeezing my tears away. Like a big boy, I laughed to myself.

Into my ear, with the warmth of a spring breeze, she sings:

I see the wind when the leaves dance by,

I squeeze my eyes shut and the red motes brightened into a green yard, a bright blue above. I see my hands, smaller, younger, waving like the leaves in the wind.

I see the wind when the clothes wave “Hi!”

Like an idiot, and me laughing at myself in the vision behind my eyes, I wave “Hello” at the clothes. Pain, I actually try to move my hand on my chest to wave it.

“Shhhhh,” comes the windy voice. I accept my mistake and calm myself. “Listen.”

I see the wind when the trees bend low,

I am back in the yard. Other children are there with me. We are all waving our arms slowly, like ponderously thick branches before a storm. We are serious in our movements, watching our hands to see that they wave just so.

I see the wind when the flags all blow.

Now it is all a flutter. Rounds of applause from the deaf. I breathe in deeply at the sight.

I see the wind when the kites Fly high,

And we are stretching, taller, longer than we can bear. My shirt pulls up over my fat, little boy belly.

I see the wind when the clouds float by.

We are gentle, passengers in the breeze. We flow in one direction, then the next. I no longer clench my eyes shut. I am one with the solid forces that keep me in place, like the wind holds on to the clouds.

I see the wind when it blows my hair,

My mouth falls open in the dark. There is nothing here to look at, nothing here but pain to feel, so I accept the bright yard, my childhood friends, and the wind that we see blowing us from this place to the next.

I see the wind ‘most everywhere!

***

The ferocious wind of the helicopter blades pulls me into the light as if grabbing me by my hair and lifting me into consciousness. Each thump thump thump, a heartbeat of a reality that I only slowly return to. A man in a thick and dusty over coat and hard hat is holding my hand with his thick and grimy glove, the outline of goggles, now around his neck, is caked in smudge around his eyes and I see them, wet and real, water streaming out of them sideways in the hurricane blast of the rotors.

“Hold on!” He yells at me, gripping my hand, as four of his companions load me, strapped on to a board, painful, but dull pressure on my legs, hips and neck. I can only see him by turning my eyes to him, my own tears being carried away in the helicopter blow.

“Hold on!” He yells one more time, as if he needs to tell me. I want to tell him not to worry about me. I want to ask him about the lady who sang to me, but he is gone and I am roughly set into the bay of the helicopter, off to some hospital, I assume, where they will fuss at the broken parts of my body.

I want to tell him, as I look out of the helicopter’s bay doors at him running back with others into a huge pile of rubble that must have been my office building, that it is okay. That it will be okay. That I see the wind most everywhere and that I will be okay.

In a blast of hot air, bouncing off the dusty ground, I am pushed up and into the sky and I am a cloud skipping across the wind.