In the wee hours

The wind outside is howling, swirling, whirling. It woke me up with its rattling ways, shaking the windows in their frames, pounding out a tattoo upon this earth. It sounds like punishment, like wrath.

For two years in college, I lived on the top floor of high-rise buildings. The wind regularly got the best of me, racing at such speeds that I thought, way up there, that maybe we’d be blown over completely, tossed to the ground like nothing. Sometimes I’d imagine all the students below me, in my same room, none of whom I knew. I wondered if they were restless too.

I lived in another high-rise after graduation, this one in the city, this time on the ground floor. That apartment felt like a secret, a funny little afterthought or first thought, the refrigerator sitting in the living room because the kitchen was too small to hold it. I was secretly glad. I loved the kitchen for its floor – black and white tiles that had been there forever – and I didn’t want more of it covered up. I bought little drinking glasses with red cherries on them and they were perfect, especially when I’d be away from the apartment and remember them, remember them and that lovely, tiled floor.

Who knows where I moved then, but of course I do, and I moved and I moved and I moved, outrunning the wind to find only that it had wrapped me up completely.

It’s so many years later, now. I listen to the sounds surrounding me: the weather, powerful; the dog, snoring; the dehumidifier, working. It’s tomorrow already. I am tired, and all I really want is to be able to sleep a little bit more.