Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

that lifted the baseball cap off my head, today, at the bluffs

overlooking the Puget Sound, as it did then, on the semi-arid

Mexican cerro?

I don’t know where wind begins or ends.

I don’t know if there’s one single wind, shapeshifting, morphing,

squall gales masquerading as calm breezes, timid gentleness pretending to

grandeur as it gusts and heaves, as it moves across the planet, absorbing

and releasing water, particulates, sand, nitrogen, carbon dioxide,

or if there are an infinite number of air currents, each one called in

for a specific season, storm, first sunny spring day or howling long night.

I don’t know if the wind enjoys pranking, watching us scramble, stamp

on papers, scarves, hats, dreams and hopes unloosed, if it’s a kind of game,

or worse, bullying, all those balloons whisked out of pudgy toddler hands,

all those roofs and windows blown out, violence chosen specifically

to imprint us with the indelible fingerprint of our eternal powerlessness.

I don’t know how far the wind has deflected me from the straight line

that was to be my life.

I don’t know if I’m the same person, or it’s the same cap, or if each molecule

that forms us is continually changed by time zone, the language we speak

to ourselves, the passing of time, imperceptible alterations that begin

deep in the fiber and make their way to the surface. It’s likely we were both

brighter, less worn. Today the brim a bit frayed, my waist a bit thicker, essence

of the hat and its wearer, I tell myself, the same, like a Latin root

unchanged as it forms new words.

I don’t know the root of the name I had before I received the one

I carry, nor where its radicals, tubers and stems spread, nor how deeply

they seek the mantle.  

What I do know is that both times I felt seen by something I’d hoped

was always there, was willing to give up the blue baseball cap and anything

else it would rip off me to stand in its warm laughing breath.