THUNDER rumbles and rolls, lightening flashes and crackles and the air fills with ozone and petrichor as the rain, threatened for so long, finally falls.
I stare out of dusty windows, prying apart ancient rust-pocked venetians and I will the lightening to come closer, closer, ever closer. I want the thunder and lightening to storm across the flat ancient saltbush splattered plains, to disturb the red dust with giant drops and settle it – to tame my racing heart and bring you back to me.
The fear that once gripped me when the storm hit is gone, replaced by a stronger even more powerful emotion.
The child who hid under the blankets the moment a small distant rumble sounded has been replaced by a woman, a woman who waits and wishes. A woman who prays for storms, who can't live without them, who drinks in the rain, the sound and smells of the storm. I relish those storms, rare and beautiful – like you, like us. I drink them in like the dry claypans absorb the drops falling, falling, missing, missing. Needing.
I move to the door, peering with wonder through the scrolled metal and ripped flywire, out across the veranda, past the weathered posts and sagging wire-netting of the fence to the purple sky with its flashes of light, it's promise.
And I wait. Anticipation and hope living and dying in my soul.
I wait.
I wait for you.
The weather rolls in and I run out. Where once I ran and hid, now I run towards. Now I run to embrace. I run through the settling dust, the falling rain, the flashing lights and rumbling sky sounds.
I run out through the gate, along the compacted red dirt out to the purple domed sky. I raise my hands and face to the heavens – to you and I wait.
I wait for you.
The lightening breaks the sky and flashes across that dome – the dome we never see in cities but out here, out here on the endless plains of an ancient land, we feel and see the dome of sky. It's like a snow globe with no snow just shimmering heat and endless mirages on hot summer days.
But tonight, tonight the sky is mine, yours, ours. Deep, inky purple flashed bright in moments of ozone and I listen to the rumble and I wait.
I wait.
I wait for you.
Rain is falling now– life blood. Restoring the land, restoring my hopes of feeling you near me again.
Tears fall.
Hopes rise and fall with rain drops and I think of you.
The god of my heart.
I think of you as I hear the thunder. I look skyward. The sky breaks, the lightening flashes and streaks through the sky and I think I see a figure.
A hammer swinging, hair flying – streaking through the wide open sky towards the earth, the claypan, me.
And suddenly the sky and my life brightens, flashes bright, brighter than I have even seen, ever felt.
And as my skin soaks you come to me and your arms circle my waist and though I am always whole and together and independent, I feel like I am lit up now. You look at me with a wide smile and I know you feel the same. You are a god and yet I can make you feel like that and I feel as powerful as lightening, as important as rain.
For one perfect moment, you and I and this ancient land are one entity, one being, one wholeness.
I smile.
The earth smiles.
And the wait ends.