I Sit Inside the Storm and She Sits Inside Me

The storm did not arrive; she erupted. Spitting and splitting the air that I was already breathing inside her fracture. A tempest she was, refusing to remain outside and instead, unfolded behind my eyelids tasting of iron and damp stone. I did not dare enter her but she entered me and I recognised the trespass as fear. The walls of the room trembled but it was my own skin quivering. The blackness parted. I stayed awake. The wind howled like an animal gnawing the rafters of my ribs. Thunder rolled thoughts that refused to end, a drum insisting on its own body. Rain lashed the metal roof, metal striking metal, until all language drowned. The air turned whirlpool. Creatures fled, even the smallest leaf tried to retreat. I lay still, watching the slow gulp of silence between the cries and felt the strange relief of being nothing more than a pulse. She was not asking to be managed. Only to be met; not solved, not corrected, not embalmed in the formaldehyde of reason. Her violence was a kind of truth too bare for words. I felt her burn through me. To live in her is not to master but to be mastered, to be dissolved until only the trembling fact of being remains. Lights gone. The solar bulb breathing its small gratitude, torches ready, electronics unplugged like tamed hearts. We listened with ears stripped to the bone to a song that was cacophony and symphony in the same breath. Gold strokes scratching themselves across the black canvas, scarring twilight, dimming stars, rain pouring in rapture in fury in a softness that hurt, and then the hush. Not the end of sound. But a falling note. A descending arpeggio gathering everything into itself until relief itself had a pulse. Silence so complete it roared back at me the way an empty seashell roars with the sea it remembers, and I understand at last. We do not live on the earth; a surface is too small a truth. We live inside her. Not guests, not tenants with keys and exit plans, but the storm’s own echo, the wind’s borrowed skin, the earth itself through our bones.