You Were A Tornado That Tore Through My Heart

By

I knew from the moment that I met you there was a storm brewing in our hearts.

I lost your voice in the din of the wind, your whispers slipping through my ears like lovers lost in bed sheets. The sirens screaming telling me to get inside, but I just want to be inside your head. I just want to make out what you said, because I see the tears streaming down your face. The rain stops, and I can hear you again for just a second. Just enough to pick out that your heart harbors feelings laden with chaos. The havoc wrought by past storms, and those turbulent times that brought you and I here in the first place.

Your smell disappeared in the breeze, but I pick up a hint of your scent again as the wind rose. I breathe you in my shirts, in my sheets, in my dreams- but these dreams are frantic. I sprint, and you stop in the storm. Lightning separates the air, like the world taking a gasp before screaming. You are gone, and my lungs fight against the relentless wind to find you. I cannot wrangle my feelings with twenty six letters and assorted symbols bear the passion held in my heart. Your thunder clap fades into an insignificant echo, and all I can do is wish you were here.

You taste like a distant daydream. I think back to seeing you on the bottom of those steps, your lips holding back the tantalizing truth. We were two birds ready to fly above the trees, but just didn’t know it yet. I keep my feet on the ground, because you’re not there to lift me up. I thrive on the memory of your lips caressing mine. After each kiss you attached another, a signature, my rescue flare. It’s fading in the distance, as I’m chasing your shadow through empty rooms.

I am not the only one who is out of touch. Your windows were boarded up long before I found my way to your doorstep, but you still felt just like home. Distractions from the growing vagrant storm chased your heart out of your chest, but I think I found it in the basement. I think that is where you thought it’d be safest. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m overstepping, walking right into the tornados tumult. As it separates the flesh from my bones, I think about your touch on my skin. To feel you is to embrace electricity, to let it ride my skin, jumping from hair to skin to cell, until my whole body is humming.

You were a sight for sore eyes. I found you spinning in the clouds; like Zeus with an agenda to strike me where I stood, just some mortal trapped in your stare. Had you climbed down from Olympus just to electrify my heart? I close my eyes and trace my eyelids, drawing you in place, in your place, where we should be. Trapped in my head ‘til I can soak you in through my colorblind eyes. While all around may be grey, you are radiant, strong, haunted. What we are is a raw metal, ready to go from forge to anvil. Press us into a compass, and we’ll point together to our true north.

They say there is a calm in the heart of a tornado, but you still hear the rage of wind under the eye. Every anxiety of mine torn to shreds by the maelstrom caught between us. I did not want to go, but I cannot control the weather. I hope one day, there is calm in your heart, and you are not tormented by the loss, destruction, and heartbreak that your winds have brought you. I would stand in that storm with you, and tighten my fingers around yours. Hold firm like a foundation meant to stand against whatever is brought against us. It will all happen the way it should.

And I think about turning the tornado around. Of straightening the mayhem in the wind to fly me back to you.

And I think I will do it, too.