Storms

I awoke to little more than a shift in air current, a shift in pressure. As I sit up slightly my eyes turn to look out the window as the temperature drops.

“It's going to rain...” the smell is in the air, wafting in under the edge of my cracked windows.

I shift my body slightly in order to crawl towards the window and open the curtain so that I could see. Darkness greets me, but I can hear the rain coming down lightly. The constant shifts in intensity tell me it's one of those wall storms, with rings of light rain ahead of it. I know the drizzle will be on and off now for about thirty minutes before the real storm gets here... and I want to wait.

Constant changes in pressure mess with my hearing and perception. I can do nothing more than sit in my bed against the wall and watch it rain, and stop, and start again. I want it to pour, I can feel it building up, gaining in intensity though it never lets more than a few drops fall. The rain teases me with my obsession.

Slowly the storm dies, falling away as if it were never there - but the smell of rain still lingers in anticipation of a storm. I tense as the rain stops and an eerie silence falls over the house. The temperature is dropping again, and the wind picks up to a peak before ceasing completely. Shivers shoot up my spine as the pressure drops dramatically.

Silence.

The full force of the storm hits with a vengeance, bending the sapling oak outside my window almost half way to the ground. The rain that drops over the house sounds like thunder, though I know that the lightning storm is a few hours behind. I sit still, basking in the beauty of the storm as it breaks over me.

This is perfection.

I move to the porch a while later, wrapped in a sarong of the deepest blue. The rain embraces me as part of it, whipping it's strong arms around me and pulling me into the glory of it all. But I must not go, I must not abandon myself so far as to release myself to the moment.

I hold myself back and cry as the rain slowly passes on. I could never possess such beauty, such raw attraction as the gentle fingers that caress the earth below and sky above. I envy what I could never be because I understand it, and because it is a part of me, but I must remain. I must remain a part of the earth as much as I long to forget myself in these tears of release, these tears that represent everything and nothing at all. But it is the curse of knowing that shows me what I can never have.

My tears bathe the wood at my feet as the rain passes and dies. The wind teases my hair into life again, and the sun raises on a dry world. I can feel the difference, the dryness in the air. I can sense it leaving, as it dwindles and dies over the next town...

I retreat, and like the rain that calls to my soul, that wakes me with it's gentle whisper of a promised storm I return to dormancy to wait for the next.