Whirlwind

ALBANY BLACKBURN

Last summer, you broke a man’s heart, and you broke the man too. The skies turned a sickly green, and the clouds spiraled around your head. The wind howled out in anguish, like an infant that knows only that to scream is to survive. You hid yourself away, tucked inside the bathtub, with your old twin-sized mattress on top. And you stayed there like that until the wee hours of morning, long after the storm had cried itself to sleep. Long after the last residual teardrops fell. There’s a saying that floats around here: “If you wait a minute, the weather will change.” By necessity, when you dream of love, you remember the tornado. And yet, here you are now, daring to melt into the candlelight and bubbles. Rising from the bath, coquettishly, as if pinpricks of cold air are more akin to goosebumps of anticipation than to shards of glass. And smiling at your reflection in the mirror, even when, in the steam, it offers only a blurry suggestion of yourself.