My yearly confession to my stormy infidelity

Every year it happens, and every year I say it won’t happen again, that I will remain faithful, devoted, tried and true.

But then ...

It will be late afternoon sometime in early July, and I will be outside.

I may not notice the storm clouds boiling up at the edge of the city, or the thin flash of lightning in the distance.

I tell myself I’m not longing for a change, not looking for a new relationship, not yearning to rekindle a brief, stormy, summertime romance.

Not overtly, anyway. Not that I’d admit.

I love the desert.

I love the dry air and the endless sunshine and the cloudless days and the horizon lines that seem to dip and curl over the edge of the Earth.

I love the certainty of the weather, the predictability. There is between us a connection built on trust, a sureness, a steadiness, a sense of inevitability in each day and each night.

But then, as if out of nowhere, there will be a whiff of moisture in the air.

It is the perfume the monsoon wears, the hint of something approaching that is beautiful and mysterious and potentially ... dangerous.

We dread it.

We long for it.

It could replenish what we need or take away everything we have.

All we know for certain is that it won’t last.

The monsoon is not a marriage. It’s an affair.

It is everything our daily routine is not. A sudden, sensuous disruption of everything we’ve grown accustomed to.

The wind picks up. The dust rises. A dark, rumbling wave of murky brown air rushes toward us, swallowing roads and buildings and mountains in its path and leaving us without purpose or perspective, then dousing us with fierce, knifing rain and wind.

Over the years I’ve told friends from the Northeast, where I was born and raised, that a monsoon storm is like that girl your mother warned you about in high school. The popular one. The one your mom said would lead you astray and then dump you.

She was right, of course, but you didn’t care.

At least, I didn’t care. And I still don’t, even after all the days and weeks and months of beautiful, peaceful, predictable sameness.

Every year it happens, and every year I say it won’t happen again, that I will remain faithful, devoted, tried and true.

But then ...

It’s not easy being the infatuated one, the needy one, the one who’s not in control. But that’s how it is with the weather.

And sometimes with life.