windswept

“See.” she would say every time in the same calm and nurturing tone of voice that I would recognize without a shadow of a doubt over the droning of the wind outside, and that familiarity was comforting to me. She would pick me up and sit me on the ivory and sage green embroidered pillows by the windowsill, with white transparent drapes hanging over the sides of them that became stained beige by the whistling grains of sand gently grazing the thin material over time. My little feet would hang off of the side of the ledge and my socks would sweep the walls made of steel that she had painted a baby pink color just for me. We would look through that window for a moment, and she would allow me to observe the brutal landscape that hummed knowingly behind the thick pane of glass.
And I would see. And I would be enamored. I would look for a long time, imagining myself in the center of it all, the sand and wind touching me with the same vulnerability that I knew from her, my delicate mother whose graceful hands would never fail to soothe me. And I had imagined that it would feel soft, that each grain would caress my skin and the mass of them together would feel like silk – or what I had hoped that silk would feel like; a shower of dulcet comfort over the fabric of my body. And I would close my eyes and listen to the whooshing sounds of the movement of the earth through the glass and I would dream that I was a part of it all. That I was not stagnant here, but as free to roam as the silt is when it flies without tether. I would look up at her, my careful mother with long dark hair and deep brown eyes and I would recognize the fear in her gaze. The helplessness. And for a moment, it would make me feel helpless too.
Now, the wind has taken me. I am thrown in every direction, my arms and legs move in violent ways and my energy is only put to waste in trying to keep them attached to my body. Each grain of dry sand cuts me like a tiny piece of glass as it smooths nicks and scrapes across my skin, eroding me into tatters. I have screamed in agony, but the cacophonous sound of the whistling sand is louder than any noise my body can make. I have grabbed hold of whatever I can find that is plastered to the earth, but I am small and weak and my mother in nature is large and powerful, she rips me away from anything I can grasp – or it, too, joins me in an infinite spiral of abrasion and never-ending motion. I have sobbed a grave and sorrowful sob, but my tears are wicked away into the humming void of nothing and no one. I am weightless, I am a mass of flesh that floats at the whim of her, this mother that knows not of suffering or tenderness. She is a rage and I am a symptom. She is a disease and I am a cell. At her mercy, I will be rooted in history long after the dust has settled. And when they find me, they will take a moment just to look.
“See.” They will say, and see they will. The remains of me will be of little more substance than whatever matter I still have attached to me now; I will be bones and the bones will be without a single dent or crack. They will be burnished and shining, polished by the ravenous sanding done on the minerals of my skeleton. And the timeless amount of rain that follows this sand will have cleaned me off, I will be a pristine white and as dead still as I have ever been, planted in place and kissed in death by an overbearing mother. And as an apology, what is left of humanity will remember me. Encasing my bones in display cases spread across the world so that everyone can have a piece. Humanity will look at me and I will look back, and death will see the both of us from different sides of the glass.