This is where she came in, a storm dancing on the edge of a knife, and a night balanced on the edge of a song.  She said she did not come to stay, and no one stays here for very long, because the sweetest places are also the most precarious places, and for that night I had convinced myself that I could live in her heart for just a moment.  She rains on me like a storm, she comes on like thunder, she focuses in a thousand directions at once, and complains that she cannot focus.  This is the spirit of a buffalo, and this is the way things fold in half, and then another hundred thousand times, raining like madness and desire over all the marketplaces in the world, able to make sense of wars, and sometimes even joy.

Oya-Yansan, the Yoruba deity of the wind, among other things, has made appearances in Tampa whenever she wants to be seen.  It’s very difficult to stop the wind for more than a moment, and it always turns out to be a bad idea to try and stop her.  Someone more savvy about gravity and falling might be able to hang adventure on tenuous chords, lit by the summer’s flight of imagination, but I did not imagine her at a summer hotel.  She always comes in the fall, or that’s when I first noticed her, running on the beaches in my mind’s eye, and I wanted to know her.  But the roots and the bones speak to the hardness of ourselves, and our own inabilities to know who we are while we are living in these bodies.

I was infatuated with Oya when I was just a boy, since I was a boy, and my first ghost was connected to the wind.  She flew by my window, a white sheet passing in a storm, and my mother said it was just paper and cloth blowing, and I didn’t believe her because I didn’t think these things were shaped like human heads, hearts, and hands, even in the strangest of winds.  I would fall in love with the wind later, much later, chasing it to the edges of the cemetery.  This is where I would come to understand Oya’s roughness, tasting it for the first time, and becoming enamored with the sweetness that is on the tip of the tongue when death is always so very close.

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