Sweeter Words.

I am cooking Indomie in my father’s home when an old memory begins to meet me where I am. A chilly summer in June - can’t remember the year - and I’m met with a sweet-smelling scent. Jude has just sat beside me, smiling and staring at my face without words. She always smelt like something sweet, almost fruity. It made me sick during colder months, but I couldn’t help but breathe it in along with the sweat and sun. Her lips are stretched wide and her cheeks are polished in a dusty pink that I am so taken aback by, and it causes me to smile too.

“What’s the grinning for?”

She waves me off, twisting and turning restlessly in her seat.

“There’s about to be a storm, babe. Better button up.”

I wasn’t sure what she was referring to then, but that night long after we separated, I came to a realization.

+

It was that night that the winds began a conversation.

Even now years after I feel as though I was creeping into something outside of my understanding.
The trees did well to scare me. Billowing wanes that brushed against the roofs of houses and telephone poles, trying desperately to enter and ruin. They knew I was listening. 

The curtains shuddered up and down, sideways and out, helplessly swept up by the breeze, lined with droplets of rain.

The trees stopped and started, gaining surge when you least expected it. It lagged and then picked up, providing the winds with an instrument, a body.

The rain began and my stomach turned. I could see bullets of water through the window, the rush of thousands blurring each droplet into half/visible pelts, coming down onto leaves only to be swiped away by the wind.

The dance was familiar now. A private encounter with nature, the drag and whisper of curtains, the tree’s song, and the rain. The pattern created itself.

by Ennie Fakoya