not an entry, but a little something to hold you over.

12/?/00

He was a tall, slender, long-legged, tornado of a boy with skin that made one want to talk of moonlight. He was always slightly tousled; hair that couldn’t help but fall into his face, a button or shoestring always coming undone, his grin a little crooked, as if he needed ironing out. I should have never let myself believe I could be the one to smooth out the creases. When he and I first met, I should have paid heed to the forecast warnings. WARNING: Hot-tempered, passionate Scorpio front will be colliding with a cool, collected Virgo front. The results could be damaging. A tornado off the charts. I should have listened. I should have, I should have, I should have . . .

But how could I ignore those eyes? So blue that the word “blue” itself seemed entirely inadequate. Looking at them, I would blink, then squint, blink again and squint harder. Surely they couldn’t really be that blue? And the way the color seemed to always be moving, like clouds pouring into a clear sky as a storm forms--surely they weren’t really doing that, either? I decided they had to be contacts, but I was wrong. It turned out that I was wrong about a lot of things with that boy.

There was a calm before the storm. The honey bun, sticky, hot day that I met him, I woke up unusually early with a jolt. There was no reason why; I hadn’t awakened from a bad dream or to a loud noise, but all the same, I shot up in bed in the early morning light. I was wide-awake and I knew, I knew, something was going to happen. The whole morning I walked on tiptoe, waiting to find that one of my best friends was getting married or that my cat had been run over or something of importance like that. But the day was painfully slow and boring, the heat suffocating everything down to a crawl. Yet, there was this anticipation burning inside of me, like the feeling you get when you’re watching a suspense movie and you know something is going to happen: the music swells, the camera darts in and then . . . nothing.

The wait was so infuriating that around noon, I could not take it anymore. In cutoff jeans, a shirt stolen from my brother and sneakered feet (no socks), I ran out of my home and to my best friend’s house. I pounded on her door, the sun belting down on me. I knew it was pointless; there was no way she would be awake already, but I had to do something. So I let my aggression out on her poor, unsuspecting, aged wooden door. I kicked and punched and slapped and slammed and cursed, but nothing continued to happen. Then, a smooth, low voice said, “Maybe you should just try a battering ram instead.” I turned my head, and then everything happened.

“What?” was the first thing I uttered towards him (I’m not very good at making first impressions) even though I had heard exactly what he said. I just wanted to hear it again. His voice was like wind rustling over plains, a kind that made me tilt my head and lean in, wanting to listen harder till my senses were full of nothing but that sound. Like straining into a seashell at the beach and listening for waves. It was the kind of voice that demanded attention, but not in an authoritarian sort of way. It made you want to listen. He could whisper at a loud, rowdy party and everyone around would shut their mouths and crowd around to hear what he had to say. When a tornado comes battling into an area, full of powerful, whistling force, it cannot be dismissed. His voice was the same way.

That first day, my fist still clenched against the wooden door as I looked down from the porch to find the owner of that voice, I heard the blaring tornado warnings going off in my head. He stepped closer, into the shade of the porch and the hand that had been shielding his eyes from the ruthless sun fell to his side. Everything moved very slowly, frame by frame. There was a long, tranquil pause. He looked up. I saw his nimbus eyes as his hair languidly feel into them and right then and there, it started to rain. His gaze shifted towards the sky and a fat drop of water splattered onto his nose. Splat, bam. And just like that, I was a goner.

To say that he “swept me off my feet” would be an understatement. To say that he appeared like a storm out of thin air, dangerous, breath-taking, swirling, entangling winds that darted out of the sky, escalating me to unimaginable heights at mind-altering speeds would be more accurate. When a tornado first appears, the first reaction is awe. Your eyes open wider and your ears perk and your mouth opens slightly in astonishment as your breath catches at such a terribly beautiful, unintentionally destructive, natural phenomenon. Your second reaction is panic. You want to run, somewhere, anywhere, and fast. But there’s nowhere to go when you can’t pull your eyes off the incredible beast and before you can force your feet to move you’re a thousand feet in the air, upside down and wrong-side up, everything reeling around you too fast to make any real sense of it.

Being with him had its ups and downs, as tornados always do. It was exciting and frightening and disconcerting and a million other oxymorons bundled into one. There was always the knowledge that I was going to have to fall sooner or later, and that it was going to hurt like hell when I did. I kept my arms out and my breath held, trying to lose myself as best as I could inside of his drastic winds and hoped it would be later rather than sooner.

Inside of a tornado, nothing else is very important. Friends, family, school, work, obligations, etc. all fall to the wayside. As the ground disappears from under your feet and you accelerate upwards, the entire world and everything that goes with it shrinks away into tiny, little toy houses and ant-sized people, then into microscopic specks, and then into an undistinguishable blur too far away to even notice anymore. It’s hard to focus on anything else when you’re in the updraft of a force so overwhelming; something you know you will never experience again, even if you do survive it. Instead you keep looking round and round at images of messy hair, blue-blue eyes and crooked smiles that go swirling past your head, moving so fast that you never quite know what’s happening or how you’re supposed to feel.

There was a strong, clear center to him that I never could reach. I would catch a glimpse of it, the eye of the tornado, but only for a split second before another gust would carry me away, flipping me around over and over until I lost sight of it. I always thought if I could just make my way there, the mysteries of his storm would come unraveled and I could remain suspended in that deep, stagnant air with him. It never happened.

Even the most powerful of storms can’t last forever. Winds shift, temperatures change, clouds part and relationships die. As suddenly as he had appeared, the draft carrying me dissolved and I fell out of his hundred mile per hour aerial arms and came hurdling to the ground. No matter how long or hard I look up into the skies, he’s not there anymore and never will be again. Just as the forecast had proclaimed, he left a tattered, disillusioned battlefield of damage behind, and me in the midst of it, picking up the wreckage of the tornado.