Wind

Last night I kept waking up to the sound of the wind whipping around the outside corners of my house and rattling my windows.

There has always been something unsettling for me in the sound of the wind. I can't seem to not notice it the way other people do -- there's something in it that makes me listen. Like listening to a heartbeat, I listen to the wind like it is proof the world lives and breathes and feels something. Something like emotion. For me, the wind carries instinctual emotion. It sounds like so many things: loneliness, pain, acceptance, love, sadness, anger, power, helplessness, voice, voicelessness ... but most of all loneliness in all of this, and an intense awareness of my own existence, and while during the day it lifts me up with a sort of insight into the essence of things (or lack thereof), at night it carries the power to make me actually cry. For no apparent reason. Even when everything in my life seems to be running smoothly and I have no reason to be unhappy.

The first time this happened was when I heard the wind more vividly than I had ever heard it in my life, vacationing at a cottage on the ocean in Cape Cod. One night there, the wind came off the sea and danced and howled around the walls of the cottage with such life that it kept me awake all night, and hearing it in combination with the waves crashing in the distance threw me into such a state of awe at the intensity and enormity of nature and despair at my own insignificance and veneration for the beauty of it all, that I actually had tears coursing down my cheeks for the hours that I drifted in and out of sleep. Nothing has moved me so much since. But every time I hear the wind at night, I remember that night, and it chills me to the bone.

Because only words are supposed to do that for me, and that soundtrack has no words, only the thing that words borrow from, that I can't get my fingers and a pencil around, and that terrifies me.