missrenie | Reflection of the Storm (Reply)

When the white hot lighting burst forth from the blackened amethyst early morning sky and stuck the green rolling hills that teemed with orange and yellow wild flowers something stuck me too.

I remember pulling over to the side of the road and getting out of my car while the lightening danced a violent staccato tarantella across the alien Wyoming landscape. I remember my heart racing to its rhythm... my blood saturated with every roll of thunder as it stalked closer. And I could not move... run... retreat from it. For the first time in my life I faced the storm. Let it wrap my in its arms and smother me. The wind picked up the tiny rocks around me and they bit into my legs like tiny ants but still I could not move... would not move.

Even when the sky opened like a spilt ripened fruit and poured down over me the cold rains gathered by yesterday sun I willed myself to stay and to embrace it back... letting it saturate me. I became so filled that the things inside of me... the dark and dirty, disgusting , unforgiving, un- merciful things that drove me across the mountains, through the hills and across the desert began to overflow their banks. Out of my womb, out of my heart, out of my head, out of my soul and out of my mouth I screamed curses and first... vile profanities... I stamped my feet into the soft earth until my calves were mudded. Then came words which weren't really words but real... a heathen, insane prayer. I mixed my tears with the tears of heaven until I became sick... drowning in the rain.

But I stayed muttering, mumbling,gasping, choking, aching until I could not feel anything except for the earth below me and the sky above me... and pleasure so intense and complete and sexual that it was painful to endure. And that was when the wind died, the heavens solidified and the last distant sound of thunder rolled away.

I was shaken. I was confused I was unsettled. I felt like I had been kissed passionately by a dying man in his last seconds of life and I knew I was never to be kissed that singular way again. I had felt life, death and divinity in a span of time that was unknown to me. As I sat in the passenger side seat and washed away the mud with a towel and a bottle of water I tried to relive or at least understand what had just happened to me.

I stayed there in the middle of nowhere for the better part of an hour and not one single car passed that stretch of road as I feebly attempted to grasp that moment. By time I left the sun had cleared the horizon and the wind was gently running its fingers through rolling hills... making green rivers run though fully opened orange and yellow flowers that covered them. I took that moment and hid it away. Locked it in the secret place. Washed it off like the mud and left it in the hills. Forgot about it because it was hurt me to think about it.

But it chased me
slowly,
stealthy,
silently.

Through Colorado's rocky mountain ranges and Wyoming's winding hills, skirting the salted plains of Utah, blazing past Nevada's white hot sands and brunt black jetties, up up up and over the rolling coast of the Sierra. It crept into San Jose down Saratoga street and caught me in its arms yesterday at sunset as I lay on a hill with the wind blowing from the South and the pointed blades of grass biting my legs and arms and neck.

I know why it was painful... why it hurt to remember. My life has always moved from one storm to the next as soon as the sky turned ashen and grey I ran, or turned away or cowered. But not that time. No that time I stood with arms open, soaring and challenging and alive. It hurt because I was dead for so long that I no longer remembered what it felt like to be alive.

Alive!!! My entire being was a sleeping limb roused and beaten until blood coursed again with the sensation of a million tiny pins and that was the pain... that was the torture and torment.

I pushed it away, denied the experience because of deep rooted monestrous reasons that I used as justification to not lead a life well lived.

I substituted false unworthiness, and shame because it was easer than dealing with the appalling veracity of selfishness, slothfulness, and stifling fear.

But yesterday I remembered, relived and was paralyzed with anger at myself but more than that I was hungry. That memory is ahead of my now instead of behind me... teasing and taunting and fresh as spring
and I am hungry for it... longing for the kiss and the thrill of thunder.