The Girl Who Named the Wind

(From the Elegy of Almosts)

They said the wind was older than sorrow and swifter than memory, that it bowed for no girl and lingered for no man. But once, in a sun-flushed village between two rivers where the leaves of the ekpé trees never stilled, a girl was born with no cry in her lungs—only a hush, like the pause before a story.

The midwife called it a silence of omen. The elders called it a silence of loss.

But her mother called it listening.

And the girl did listen—more deeply, more greedily than anyone had known a child could. She listened to the rustle of kola shells, the twitch of yam tendrils in loamy soil, the low coughs of dust devils circling the courtyards, and, always, the wind. Especially the wind.

By the time she was ten, she knew the difference between wind that warned and wind that welcomed. By fifteen, she could tell you where the harmattan would break early, where the plantains would lean low, where the dust would carry bad luck.

By sixteen, she spoke back.

Not in words. In rhythms. In patterns. In the old wind songs no one had taught her but that she seemed always to have known.

She braided wind into mats to trap bad spirits. She let it loose to pollinate healing flowers far from their seasons. She once whispered to the storm in a way that made it stagger, pause, and shift its ruin elsewhere.

And still, she remained unnamed.

Because the girl would not take a name until the wind gave her one. She waited. And listened. And loved—once, with a fisherboy who never returned. Twice, with a dancer who left for the salt caravans. And a third time, with a woman who tasted like dusk and ruin.

But none could keep her.

One day, the wind changed. It came heavy and strange, from the east where the world tilted. It smelled of ash and iron and breathless screams. People called it war. She called it a betrayal.

And when it swept through her village, hot and cruel and relentless, she stood in the path of it and said her first true word. A word not in any tongue, but in all of them. A name.

Her name.

The wind stopped.

It curled around her, like a lover ashamed. Then fled.

That night, the elders gave her place among the memory keepers. The griots began to hum her songs without knowing why. The children who once laughed now followed her shadow. And the wind—it never again entered her village without kneeling.

No one remembered the girl’s old name. But when the winds came now, soft or screaming, they called her name as they passed through the hills.

And so did the trees.

And so did we.