To Capture the Howling Wind

A storm hit this little Louisiana town tonight, lashing the willows and old oak trees, drowning the streets in murky water.  We’re close enough to the Gulf to be able to taste the salt on the wind that whips in from the water.

I sit at my dining room table beneath a small, aging chandelier fixture that is flickering in time to the repeated illumination of lightning, writing by hand in a battered leather journal with yellowing pages, a journal that reminds me of the book I took from the shop today.  So many words flow, images trapped for so long, let loose like the flooding outside.  I write because I have to— if I don’t, I think I might burst.  I write of the wind, captured and chained, drawn into mortal form, turned into a tool for power and dominance.  The wind outside the windows wails like the bean sidhe who mourns an imminent passing as I write these things, and I somehow feel as though she mourns for me.

Which makes no sense.

It should make no sense…

My head is hurting again.

Weakness

Exhaustion.  The room spinning, head pounding.  Deep aches in my joints, in my muscles, sharp and intermittent pains in my internal organs.  It’s happening more and more frequently.  I’ve always been a bit prone to illness, but lately it seems worse, my body turning on me.

“Oh, that’s just God ans’rin’ our prayers, honey,” my mother tells me over a cup of coffee that I’d reluctantly agreed to meet her for.  Her voice is tinged with a deep Southern accent that I never picked up despite growing up in small-town Louisiana.  ”Not a day goes by that your daddy and me don’t pray up a storm for you, that God will throw obstacles in your path to lead you back to him.  I  know you don’t like it, an’ I know you don’t like me sayin’ it, but it’s the truth, sweetheart.  You will be miserable an’ sick an’ always runnin’ around in circles till you figure that out.”  She smiles at me, saccharine-sweet, as if her words had not cut me for the thousandth time.  ”We only do that ‘cause we love you.  You know that, don’t ya?”

I don’t answer her.  This is exactly why I’ve cultivated distance from my parents.  It took me years to realize that this is abuse, because it’s all I knew as a child.  Who the hell wishes harm on another in order to bully them into believing the “right” way?  I try not to hate her, because hate only eats me up inside.  It’s hard, though.  I hold back a simmering rage that only seems partially connected to my family’s treatment of me.  I’m never quite certain of the origins of that deep fury.

I’ve scheduled another doctor’s appointment, but I’m sure they’ll say the same thing they’ve always said.  They don’t know what’s wrong with me, why my body fails me.

The Song of Color

I often take long walks in my small-town Louisiana neighborhood, inhaling the scent of the wisteria, the oleander, the crepe myrtle that froth along the verdant lawns, melodic colors accented by the thrumming, subdued harmonies of the aging, peeling hues painted on the houses.  The warm spring wind caresses my cheeks, bringing with it the taste of rain, tiny droplets shimmering in the heavy air.  I turn my face to the overcast sky, my eyes picking out the subtleties of the swirls of violet and indigo, touches of warm green in the deepest shadows, a faint tinge of pink in the light, flecks of gold limning the edges of cloud where the sun peeks through.  Gray is not a word in my vocabulary— I see too many intricacies to use such a crude and overly simplistic descriptor.

I breathe in these colors, these refractions of light and music that dance in my mind.  They bring me a sort of peace, easing the ache in my head, my body, my soul.  I feel the life around me, and it makes me smile, a faint but slowly re-illuminated memory of joy and desperately earned freedom.