It was a brief affair. That spring the weather was refreshing, a sudden and welcomed break from the torrid ice storm that shut down everything in the area for 2 weeks, forcing everyone into hotels, or into barrack semblances of their everyday leisurely existences. I'd decided to meet a friend at a local bar after being holed up for over a week, had gone outside for a smoke, and turned around to see him-- an acquaintance from an ex of my past. The contagious smile caught my attention, our eyes collided simultaneous with mutual recognition, and we spent the rest of the night inseparable, talking nonstop, and danced and laughed until dawn, when we both fell down exhausted and slept finally overcame us.
There was some bumpy resistance on both our parts, but despite our good intentions to heed those cliched social mores regarding exes of friends and friends of exes, we fell hard and fast anyway. There was a sweet naivety about it all, and a charged sexuality to even it out, and it took us both by surprise. One evening, after dusk-- when the night is dark and clear and the stars are just lighting the sky with their brightest flames-- he leaned into my ear, as the wind whipped through the trees around us, and I drew in a deep breath. "One day I'll teach you how to listen to the wind, to hear what it says..." I smiled and settled back into him, looking upwards back into his face and those deep blue eyes, and said " I'd like that."
Not too much later, we parted ways. It was hard for me at the time, although I knew we had different priorities, knew I needed more than he could ever give, knew I had so much more to give than he could ever grasp or use. I suppose it was rather hard for him too at the time. But such is life. Sure, a lot more fun could have been had, perhaps a few more lessons learned, or insights shared, but not enough to prolong the inevitable fork in the road calling our names, in divergent paths.
On the last night that we met, once again upon his back deck, I looked at him, filled with the bittersweet rue of things left undone. "You never showed me how to listen to the wind," I said, and he pulled me back into him, wrapping me in his arms, a moment just as pure and strong as the first night he brought it up. Tucking a strand of my hair behind me ear, he turned me around to face him and looked into my eyes. "Ah, Charity," he sighed tenderly with a bittersweet smile of his own. "But you already know how, darling..." I looked back into those blue eyes rivaling the clear spring night sky, and smiled, realizing what he spoke was the truth-- and moreso-- one I had known all along. There was nothing more he could show me, and he had not the scope to see all the many mores I could show him.
I looked back up into the sky, and we danced a little spin and twirl, just as we'd done the first night we became more than acquaintances. And then he released his grasp, and I spread my arms wide, as the winds whipped and swirled around me, and twirled slowly, becoming one with the fluency of the breeze. The trees whispered, as if in response and attuned to my breath, and I kept twirling, twirling, until I stopped and opened my eyes upward to take in the night sky, just in time to see the tail end of a star shooting across the dark blue unknown. I smiled, accepting confirmation that the beginning of the end was indeed over. Then I took his hand, and he lifted me up, as I wrapped my legs around his waist-- our signature routine-- and we went inside to bed. Before the sliding door closed, I heard the winds call to me: 'Good night, love, we'll see you in the dawn.'
And the next morning, the sun was brighter and clearer than it had been the entire time of our affair. It was end of a new beginning. A beginning long in the making, Atam, although it would yet be a few linear months until our official meeting in this world. I just had to make a pit stop first. And you had to wake up and make the call.
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