How do you bring a cloud to tears?
To walk beside one means she has found favor,
and lowered her atmosphere for a moment,
just to wonder about love.
She laughs.
She giggles.
She grows comfortable in the lower air.
Many would call her fog.
But she knows the truth:
she is the cloud who lowered her expectations
only to discover what love might be.
And when the weight of that discovery becomes too much,
she cries,
and the world calls it rain.
But I’ve done something—
something so harsh
that the confusion of the rain
angers her even more.
“That is not rain,” she says.
“Those are tears.
And you hurt me.”
Suddenly the sky is no longer a mystery.
The storm is no longer nature.
It is a wound,
floating above the world,
waiting to be understood.
Letters from Xhale the magazine Words that breathe. Stories that Linger, 