Touch
Response to a Prompt
It was cold today, and wet, when we left for our walk: and there was a breeze and a drizzle.
They touched me, the wind, water and the walk, caressed my skin, sent a couple of goosebumps into my hungry soul.
On the backroad behind Inorbit and Infiniti, every tree leaf is soaked and smiling, their trunks and branches have drunk up the moisture and look plumply soggy, like the most recent injection of collagen on a starlet’s lips. Clouds hang low and sometimes the breeze becomes a stiff wind, the drizzle turns into a downpour and all around the rim of my open umbrella, happy streams of water run.
I walk behind the man I live with: that’s the only way he won’t see that I move the umbrella away from my head and turn my face up to the sky and let my hair and eyelashes get wet. You know that song about ‘snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes…?’ That’s the feeling.
He is very protective about me, and knows that I have these crazy impulses from time to time, and he is sure that I will catch a cold or something. So he keeps a stern eye open for crazy behaviour.
Though gyms are open, there are still people running, walking, jogging and cycling on the road. It does my heart good to see them. But for all the people who stay at home, and have a million excuses on why they should not go out, please remember that when we have the liberty and the chance, please don’t let laziness or indifference cause you to lose the chance to go out and feel the touch of the sun and the wind on you. Look at the Sun and the stars when you can, in the open. At 8 am in the morning nowadays, the Sun is so high in the sky that it is almost directly overhead. Why? I do not know. Things, weather, people, politics are changing so quickly, that one doesn’t know from one day to the next what is round the corner.
When you can, stay in the company of the eternal, the unchanging, the perpetual.
Before that’s taken away from us, too.
Please don’t take them for granted.
I smelt the rain today. The rain touched me.
Did you? Did it, you?
Stay in touch. With people, places, perfect sunsets, passion and poetry.
Stay in touch, with words. In places and spaces stalked by darkness and despair, they light a flame of hope and healing.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
A response to Christine Graves’s ‘A word a day prompt’. I used tomorrow’s word ‘Touch’, today. Thank you for the worlds within the words, Christine Graves.
