Remnants of Hurricanes

This reminds me of you....he said...it was in the gloaming of an evening showering blondes and yellows from a faint sun obscured by clouds and rain...the sky was fantastic.  The air was filled with the pulse of rain and wind that drove both colorless drops and colorful leaves in scattering downpours.

The trees lilted and piroutted and shed tiny bits, seemingly moving in unison then randomly. 

Why? she replied.

Well...first of all, being named after a hurricane would be pretty awesome...as the skies collected the remnants of Patricia and strew them across the horizon....but I think the thing that I was sort of intimating isn't the power, or the fury...or any devastation--

-Well that's thoughtful--

Let me finish...it is in the aftermath...it is the scrubbed clean air...it's like the day was freshly washed...it is--

So I'm an exfoliant?

Christ would you let me finish?  No.  I can find that in a drugstore...you're way rarer.  

Well...thank you.

But it is the calming impact of an afterwards....like violence then calm, like wind then nothing...but there is clearly evidence.

Evidence?

Like something has happened...something has changed.  

Like what?

Like...like me...like when you walk by you strip me of my senses....maybe briefly, but you dust away my current thoughts...you scatter my immediate concern...you dissipate my worries...maybe just for a second but you leave me with  nothing but a very clear and unfiltered view of you and I find that amazing.

She paused, head down.  Maybe that's how you should've started this conversation.
 

 

Invoke an Absence

The shape of her is fingerprinted in his mind...the way she walks, the way her head turns and allows the slope of hair to glide and fall against her.  The way her eyes move from the ground to high-beam into him, sometimes the tiniest...

tiniest pull of the line of her lips into a sad smile.  A clench.  Wry.

If like him she lets something break inside that spills warm...chest-high, acetylene-pure and a little remorseful...because breaking something should hurt.

And you would figure over time that the little parts would ossify, they'd harden like a fossil, rust even.

No.  These remain vivid...blood-red and body temperature right...never exhausted, never worn out.  These tiny bits that remain...like the parts of a bullet left inside a body, in-extricated, spread out in some random pattern.  Just below the skin.

You would think that in the absence there could never be such presence.

That in the fall colors it would be a gray spot...a morning fog color due to just time doing its slow acid drip on memory so razor thin it is now barely reminiscent.

But not her, and her way about him...she lay inside of him, encapsulated in tiny crystalline capsules of memories....built over time and built over effort.

And the ironic effect that every time he saw her, or perhaps even less...thought of her...

another one burst inside of him and was very soon and quickly....

tidily, efficiently and perhaps more than a tad magically...

became replaced by a fresh and brand new one.