Once I Danced With a Storm

She tips her head back, baring her throat and self to the sky. To anyone else, this day would classified as dreary, but she revels in all of it-the palette of grey occasionally touched with blue and purple that rolls across the sky, the crisp wind that tugs at her chocolate hair, and the slight chill that brings everything into sharper focus. Her head turns to me, and though her eyes are the dark umber of soil never seen by sun, I do believe I can see the lightning that plays behind the clouds in her eyes.

"Can't you taste it?" she asks me.

"Taste what?"

"The storm!" She throws her head back again, breathing in deeply, her mouth parted slightly.

"The storm," she repeated. "It is...so alive. It tastes of water from mountain rivers, of blackberries straight from the vine, of the blood from a bit lip. The very air crackles, can you not feel it?" I confessed to her that I could not. Whatever connected her to air and the land had passed over me as if I did not exist. A crease appears on her brow and white teeth worry her bottom lip. My eyes do not move from the flush of blood that blooms wherever her teeth touch. 

"You need to taste this, you need to know." With a lunge her hands fold themselves around my neck and jaw, trapping my head. Her lips capture mine and it is like nothing like a kiss. There is no warmth to it but a heat that burns like both fire and ice. There is no passion but an urgency that rushes wild as horses along the coast. There is no love but a longing that runs as deep as the ocean. She pulls away from me but nothing else does. I feel like a whirlwind has taken up residence where my organs ought to be. My hand is caught in hers and off we run across the grass, off we whirl across the field.

With a roar, the sky fractures along cracks set ablaze with a white fire, and down pours the rain. For a too fleeting moment, so do we. We sprint across the sky with the lightening. We talk with the wind and it tells me its name. We dance across tree tops and flirt with the very heavens it seems. 

And then it is over, and the last remnants of the wind place us on top of a hillside, as gentle now as it was fierce a moment ago. I feel empty and wrung out, as if someone took me apart, scrubbed everything thoroughly, and then put me back together again. She looks fulfilled. As I watch, the glow fades from her dark eyes but not from her soul. Though I am once again blind and deaf to the names of the wind and sky, she is not. 

"Do you understand now?"

"I do." And my answer is true. She is of two worlds and always will be. The half that loves me is not the half that loves the sky and sea, and between the two of us will she always be.