In the daily breeze, i find you

In the daily breeze, I find you; I am reminded of the times we had and of the memories we can no longer create. I do not always want to embrace it, but I will always face it.

After a long and dark winter, I was walking along a foot-worn path and hadn’t yet noticed that the trees were perfectly still until I clocked the movement of that one small branch in my periphery. The air was so quiet and calm, but for the micro draft seemingly isolated to those few dancing leaves. Spring’s fresh sun warmed the frosty forest bed as the Robin landed on the swaying branch and his feathers fluttered in these otherwise invisible waves of moving air. As he breathed into his diaphragm, filling his chest, I too, was reminded to breathe.

The sound of a heavy summer air pushing its way through the Beech tree rustled awake a longing that is always lingering just below my surface; a longing that mirrors an oncoming storm that the distant thunder had warned me of.

I find myself wanting the breeze to cut through the thick heat that sits on the palette of our town like a full bodied wine loiters upon one’s tongue. I invite the rush of feeling as the season’s neverending daylight has curbed my inner darkness and I realize that like the storm clouds that have spent time accumulating their moisture, I too have built up a backlog of precipitation that needs to fall.

In fall, walking along a congested street, this early crowd of pedestrians I’m amongst is briefly, but collectively halted by the cooling wind whipping through the tunnel of skyscraping towers on this mid-autumn day.

The group always moves forward, but my course is forever altered and the sails begin to flail, once again, in a different direction from my originally charted path.

A familiarity in this current brings me back to when we were young and alive; today’s early breeze carries upon it both the scents of morning and a sense of mourning.

I find myself wondering if this recognizable wind is the same gust that once warmly brushed our skin as we strolled carelessly along the edge of the enveloping ocean’s shore.

You see, the wind never dies, it just dies down where you are and continues on its way to the next town.

I worry the winter’s biting gales will be upon us soon and my ears ache in anticipation. I can hear the howling of the wind that is made visible by the snow it picks up and whirls around in a menacing trance. I then feel the sting underneath the Vaseline I’ll apply to the bitten cheeks I didn’t properly protect from the elements that I knew were there. The days will be shorter and the early darkness will provide a spread of sorrow that will cover my shoulders like a weighted blanket. My candles’ light will flicker in the whistling wind permitted in through the crack in my bedroom window.

In the daily breeze, I find you; I am reminded of the times we had and of the memories we can no longer create. I do not always want to embrace this grief, but I will always face it and in it, find you and me.

Written by: Josh Veit - 2024