The Car Park Wind Made Me Feel More Awake Than Coffee Did

Dear Delyara, I had just dropped the children off and was walking back to the car when the wind hit my face hard enough to make me stop for a second. Cold, sharp, alive. It startled me into the present. Not in a magical wellness kind of way. Just enough that I felt my body again instead of only the machinery of the morning. School run, packed lunches, reminders, work thoughts, bills, one child’s mood, another child’s missing reading book — all of it had been running ahead of me like a line of little alarms. Then the wind cut through all of it for one clean second. I stood there by the car and realised how rarely I fully arrive in my own body before 9 a.m. That made me sad. It also made me grateful for weather. Sometimes nature doesn’t heal me. It interrupts me. And that interruption feels like mercy.