Bringing Weather Along

At some point, she thought, the weather was all they had in common.

So, because she loved him, she began bringing it along.  Little cloudy days stuffed into small notebooks, or a rainbow in the sunshine fancily placed in a little box as a surprise present.  That one cold day in September, when it's not supposed to be too cold, saved like a postcard in a memory book, or that strange warm day in the middle of the winter, that would melt snow if there were snow, scribbled like an afterthought on a scrap of note paper.

Eventually she began leaving the weather at his place.  It began absent-mindedly, a small drawing of a crisp autumn dusk forgotten on the coffee table, & an envelope of spring rain that fell behind the sofa when the cat jostled it, walking by.

At some point, she began to wonder where all the weather went.

Her mother, in the weekly phone call, found it impertinent that she couldn't talk about such a simple subject.  Yet she would look around helplessly when asked, "What's the weather like there, dear?."  I was like someone had misplaced her perceptions.

Once she was with him, it was, of course, all they talked about, & their discussions began to take on giant proportions: a night comparing a century of hurricanes that was the closest to passion they'd had in years; an evening drinking hot beverages & slowly trudging through Ice Ages.  His eyes flashed like lightning & she thought he was falling in love with her again.

At home, looking out of her bedroom window, the world looked empty & dull.  She knew, this was not what he was seeing.  When she looked out his window, it was like she was looking at a meteorologist's map, it's lines, arrows, & numbers a magnificent language she felt fluent in.

Surely she had to get the weather back!  But how?

He noticed parts of it missing as soon as she started to steal bits of it away.  Truthfully, she wasn't subtle at all - the first thing she fled home with were those two perfect weeks of spring that anyone would miss.  So he told her to stop taking his weather, or visit him no more.  In his mind, the weather had always been his; he had no idea how much of it she had brought, over the course of the past year, to a home mostly filled with beer commercials & sports on the television.

She tried to explain to him that no-one owned the weather, & then promised sweetly to return all that she had taken some day.  She simply wanted to check some of it out, like library books.  His covetousness, his jealous anger, frightened her.  He roared like thunder at her, & the only thing she managed to leave with, that last day, was a fog she found herself in.

But she was right: no-one owned the weather.  & one morning a stray raindrop found its way into her eye & acted like a kind of prism to break up her weatherless world with desultory storm clouds & a furtive sun peeping behind them.  She began to feel the wind again.  She couldn't believe she had forgotten things as simple as humidity or hail.  She greedily took even the hottest days, the gloomiest nights of rain, until she had filled her house like a hoarder with all types of weather.

& she missed him no more.  But she wondered, was there enough weather for everyone?