Once, the boy had asked, “Wind, why are we born?”
The wind had shoved the boy’s chin, knocking against him playfully. The boy, when he was young, had often asked pointless questions.
He’d smiled at the wind’s chiding and stared at his tightly folded hands. “Ah. I see. We’re born so we can die. I suppose the only choice we have is who we die for. Right, Wind?”
The wind wasn’t so sure about that. It had lived since wind was spoken into existence. It had been born with the moon and the sun and the shooting of cosmic rays over the flat, vacant expanse that became this earth.
Death ignored the wind, and for eons, the wind had ignored death.
The wind scraped over a cresting wave and tasted the knife edge of the curving water. It peered at the moonlight reflecting in the opaque depths, calling out, Boy?
How long would the wind search? It didn’t know.
There was no time. There was only now. And now was the heavy weight of funeral shrouds and cloaked despair.
How long would it last? Perhaps forever.
In the confessional closet of its midnight grief, the wind admitted it may mourn forever.
Could the wind mourn? Could it feel?
Feelings were human things. They were beneath something as wondrous as the wind. Yet the wind had made itself into something new for the boy. Perhaps this hollowed-out, echoing, anguished moor feeling was what happened when the wind allowed itself to love.
Because if the wind could love . . . it could grieve.
And if it could grieve, it could weep.
The wind had always wondered at the taste of tears. They were a distillation of a human’s soul, captured in a dreadful longing of bleeding salt and spirit.
At the beginning of the world, the wind had tasted night and day, sun and stars, water and earth. Human tears tasted just like those first cosmic waters. It was as if when a human cried, they were trying to return to the time before the beginning, when they were still an unspoken song, an unborn ideal. Tears were their mournful plea.
The wind never wished for things that couldn’t be. But it wished, just this once, for tears to shed. If it could love, then why couldn’t it cry?
Wasn’t love the preceptor of tears?
It wanted to spill the tears of its spirit over the world. Instead, it swept rain-soaked mists over the Hudson. It blew a mournful fog through the shadow canyons of the city’s buildings. It flew to the heavens and gathered warm rain to fall in giant, weeping drops onto hot pavement, groaning taxis, and hunched pedestrians.
The boy.
Its boy.
It created a mournful choir of rain and fog and mist for its boy. Perhaps it would mourn until the rain flooded the city and buried the forest of buildings so they were only branches reaching out of a swamp. Perhaps it would mourn until the oceans rose and shrouded the streets in salt water. Perhaps it would mourn until all of humanity mourned with it.
Sometimes, the wind visited the girl and asked, Where is the boy? But she didn’t know either. And the girl tasted like the rocklike one now. There were violets still, but there was also cold granite and the metallic flavor of unending pain. The scent of pain was carved into her, like a relentless river’s harsh grooves worn deep into a rocky canyon. The wind witnessed the setting of her sun and the descent into darkness. It rose and fell on her quick, panicked breath as she lay in Hell Gate’s underground tomb.
The wind had spread over her like a thin sheet and tried to comfort her as the boy had once asked it to do. It couldn’t save the girl—it never could—but it could blanket the frightened, rapid beating of her heart.
The wind witnessed the cold, rocklike flood crawling through her veins and petrifying her heart. When her pulse finally slowed, she tasted of stone and ice. She had no tears. Not for the boy. Maybe not for anyone.
If the wind weren’t an intelligent, cunning, masterful being, then it might believe the girl was exactly like the rocklike one now.
But the wind could enter locked things. It could sweep under doors; it could find tiny crevices; it could fly on dust motes and sneak through keyholes and twist through locks. The wind knew what the girl was doing. She was keeping a secret. The wind would keep it with her.
The girl would mourn in secret.
The wind would mourn in fog and rain and moaning gusts.
Perhaps forever.
