I don’t like you. Nobody does.

You mess up my hair. If I wear a skirt, you have to show everyone in the street what’s underneath it. I want to cry. You don’t stop.

You knock over the bins early in the morning when you’re mad. The rubbish tumbles along the street. The red tissue from my nosebleed waves around, stuck in a gutter. The cherry blossom tree in my front garden is only pink for a few days, because you reach up and shake the branches. The petals let go and fall to the ground, where they shrivel up in the rain.

There are days when you’re nice. I touch you, run my fingers slowly over your spine, but you don’t have a clue. Before I know it, you’re angry again.

I go inside but you knock at the windows. How do you reach so high? I close the curtains, play music, but you still don’t leave me alone. I’m waiting on the sunshine, a rainbow – but when you’re around, it never comes. You scare me.

Nobody knows who you are, or where you come from, or why you come. Nobody knows when you’re going to leave. Sometimes you come alone. Sometimes you bring your friends. They spit at me. Shout at me. Throw rocks at me.

The only way I can ignore you is with headphones and sleep, Bon Iver playing in my ears as I enter dreamland, a place I don’t like to go. My dreams are strange and never chronological. Just image bursts and dark silhouettes and worst-case scenarios all night long. But it’s the only way to escape you.

In the morning, sometimes you’re gone. Tired, I suppose. Busy, elsewhere. I’m sure you have other victims. Other cities, towns, seasides that you want to devour. People you want to trip up, ice cream you want to steal, treehouses you want to break. You’re not welcome here, and you know that. Yet – you return, without warning, all of the time.

This story is about the wind. An element of weather I hate with a burning passion (in case you couldn’t tell). I wanted to write the wind as if it were abusive, partly because personification is fun and wind is disdainful; and partly because I feel I have met people in life that remind me of wind. People that scare me, haunt me, and never learn from their actions. So while it’s about the wind, there are a few layers to this piece.