Halfway in a Storm

 There are nights when the wind feels like it’s tearing skin,

when it screams down from the mountains so hard

it plucks leaves like confessions from every branch.

On those nights I taste you in the rain,

like salt on my lips when thunder cracks the sky open.

I tell myself to stay away,

to root my feet in another field,

but the wind always crooks its finger toward you,

and I’m dragged by the feral part of me that wants

to stand in your storm and let it strip me clean.

I wander through wet fields, ankles sunk in mud,

sky pressed so low it brushes my eyelashes.

The rain hammers out every thought

except the sound of your voice

buried somewhere in the downpour.

It’s like nature knows your name,

like clouds have memorized the syllables.

I keep trying to plant myself,

to drive my own stake in the earth and say,

“This is enough. I will grow here without him.”

But growth doesn’t answer to speeches.

It answers to weather,

and you are a weather system I can’t outgrow.

Your absence feels like drought... 

cracked soil, brittle stems that snap

when you look at them too hard.

Then suddenly, without warning,

you call me and my ribs are rivers

bursting their banks.

It is chaos and salvation all at once.

You say, “Meet me halfway,”

and I laugh and cry at the same time.

What is halfway in a storm

when I am already made of torn clouds and bent branches?

Halfway is the eye of it:

a moment’s calm where I can look you in the face

and see myself reflected back

in puddles and your pupils.

Halfway is a flooded field

where two rivers meet and make a lake,

and the current decides our direction.

We stand there:

soaked, trembling,

steam rising from our skin like prayer

and everything around us grows wild, uncontained,

because nothing that raw can stay neat.

I am drenched and raw and alive when I’m near you.

I am a storm front that refuses to move on,

a tree that leans toward your lightning

even though it knows the risk.

And if anyone asks me why,

if they tell me I should seek shelter elsewhere,

I will open my hands, rainwater dripping from my palms,

and say, “Because this is where things grow.”