Elanor Goes Outside

Storm Season

     I had childhood any kid would deserve. My mom and dad both loved me. She would teach me how to surf the clouds on winds, how to gather them for comfort, and how to ease them into calm air. Whenever the air would ease for long enough, we would take our cloud to the highest peak, and bask in nothing.

     We would also eat on the mountains, and sometimes camp there before we take up clouds again.

     There would be other families near us when we did this. I always looked for them, seeing if there was anyone that felt anything. There was so much going on in someone's bored face, staring out with dead eyes. They're away from their people, people who look at nothing with a face that'd make you kill something. Not with anger either; these strangers brought out vengeance with their faces because of how much pity it seemed to scream for. I would talk to my mom and dad about what was going on with these people, about how the one away from the others had hurt one of them.

     My parents weren't excited to hear me make fake gossip about strangers. My mom thought I was funny, though. She wanted to hear my stories when my dad had fallen asleep. She said he'll be okay with it when I grow up, and that this would help with that.

     "So, that shorter, angry one near that fire wants to throw the sulking, lonely one in the fire," I'd tell her. "He doesn't think that would cause a ton of problems, which would be true except for that short one with the softer face that's looking at the lonely one."

     "Ok... but, what did the lonely one do?"

     I would stare at the people for a while before starting to doze off. She'd always wrap me back up next to her. I thought this was her way of keeping me awake. She would respond before I got a chance to though.

     "Do you think the lonely one might have something going on at home with their family?" she asked me. "Maybe they did something out of line because they haven't said anything for so long. I think they wanted to make up for it with something that would get their family back. His family didn't know he felt angry at them until he lashed out, and because of that, they think he's hostile instead of angsty, but he's hostile because he's angsty. He hasn't shown any emotion for so long that he forgot his family did. It had been festering long enough that his loved ones were only seen as factors in his anger. But now, his emotions have taken up so much space in his brain that he never had the space to think about things. And, to be fair, if his family isn't thinking about him either, now, he has a right to his sulking. By the way, things are gonna be okay for them. As long as the angry one, that's his mom, doesn't let her feelings get out of control."

     I laughed at this. I didn't understand things like that when I was younger. I only thought it was cool to watch people. I didn't know about what was going on around me. I didn't think of my parents that much, not what they thought about, not what they were going to do. It was only when I saw them do something interesting that I paid attention.

     In less than six hours, the winds would start picking up again, and I'd have to wake up to magic training. I couldn't help my skills, but trying to harness a morning storm and calm it, even with three people, makes kids feel a lot of things. The wind pulling you back from the cloud, the noises drowning out your mom and dad, the rain making a wall that keeps you in a little square. I was nine back then, and I still act nine now, since I've barely worked on storms since then.

     The wind had pushed me down. I saw the sky below through a cloud. It is an ocean of things that little kids don't think about but chase after every day, the view below a cloud. Hundreds of villages, mountains, and valleys that hold all kinds of a different life. The people down there knew it was raining. But not the people a bit to the left of them, or the ones a bit to the right. Those didn't know about the mountains as well as the ones at the mountains did, and the mountaineers didn't know about the valleys as well. If this storm would push me down to a world like that, I would have let it throw me in the split second it took my mom to pull me up.