Madnesses In Common

 The wind. Today it feels vengeful, wrathful, intent on its goal.

I know I would have gone prairie mad on the frontier, back in the gold-rush days. I wouldn't have been crazed by the wide-open spaces reducing me to insignificance, though, or been beaten down by the hardness of the seasons. The inescapable wind would have done it, the relentless sound of it, the push of it in its own tide running through and over everything.

I hunker down against it tonight as if I've done it a hundred times before in former lives. The wind bothers me, makes me think (feel) like a horse. If I were a horse, I would spook and jig, flare my nostrils and step head high, discovering enemies in familiar things made newly strange by the wind. I can't keep tabs on the world for the roar of it; it interferes with my senses, picks me to the bone.