The air, heavy & pregnant with anticipation, lightly touches the hair along your arms
It’s the first stirrings of the inevitable.
The hair stands,
end on end – clinging –
to the soft breeze.
A stillness has settled across the world;
Pale – dark – grey – green clouds dance their way, ever closer.
The creeping formation silencing and stopping the world,
Floating forward, slicing its way through the air
Birds, squirrels, people – a world filled with life vanishes
Trees sink their roots deeper, bracing for the coming
Stillness, no, not stillness,
Anticipation so palpable the world radiates it
Seeping through every pore, taste bud, rod and cone.
Fear – excitement – mixed together
Tensing and unclinching muscles as your body floods itself with adrenaline
Nerves along your back shimmer, spasms of energy,
Cleansing your body of all imperfection,
Leaving nothing but a burning torch – as the darkness closes around you.
Your senses are flooded, overwhelmed, buffeted, and stripped away
Geosmin swirls around you, so thick your mouth waters
The grass and the trees rustling, a melodic hymn so smoothing & so frantic
The first drop hits you,
You feel it – fired five hundred miles an hour into your chest –
The only reminder is a shotgun patterned sunburst of wet splayed across you
Another bullet, another drop, another sunburst
The cascade begins
The world explodes into raw – unfiltered energy
An unending deluge punches you square in the gut,
raking your face with pure ferocity,
cradling you like a newborn babe,
an old familiar friend meets your smile with loving wet kisses.
Your clothes, soaked beyond measure, melt into your flesh,
Blades of grass wrap themselves around you – their wet grip cementing you together
Rain fills your nostrils with its wetness
Wind howling and screaming turns the world on its axis –
Directions cease to exist, rain pounds into your naked body at ninety degrees –
Zephyr pulls and tugs at your frame, until,
Nothing is left but bone.
The anxiety within you breaks against the gates of your mind.
The constant strain ripping the hinges off
Grinding and tearing the metal into shrapnel
The torrent of thought & feeling coursing
Its way through familiar well worn channels
You scream into the wind,
No one answers, but
You did not need an answer,
The feral, prime sound wasn’t for anyone else,
A bottomless pit pours itself into the world born on the reverberations of your breathe,
Only to be beaten and drowned by Mother Earth’s gentle, loving caress.
You are swimming in the life around you.
An ocean’s worth emotion crashes along the sun-bleached bones of your life
The frantic and pure energy of the tempest feeds you as
A hundred thousand places, millions of faces, and a billion thoughts screech through your mind
Packed and stacked haphazardly in a rusted boxcar,
That rocks and shakes, nearly derailing at every turn
A cacophony building in strength, until your lips part
It was here you were born,
It is here you will stay,
Lightning bursts and thunder flashes in the world around you, but inside
The squall’s strength is hammering you back together,
Gusts of wind are framing each piece of the tapestry,
Molten plasma soldering you whole.
The unadulterated force rocking the world
Sings you a childhood lullaby a thousand miles & decades away
Your frame drenched, shaken, and broken
Inside, a fire burns in the summer night
Fifteen minutes. The entire downpour lasts less than a quarter of an hour,
The formation of clouds dances onwards
taking with it the silence and the stillness
Birds chirp, fireflies bob and weave through the twilight
You lay covered in damp grass and sopping clothes
Yet, a smile draws itself across your face
Ear to ear
A pure, unfiltered, mirthfilled laugh escapes your rasped throat