- to know where the wind goes.

Today is a wintery Melbourne day like every other wintery Melbourne day. Today we choose to go outside because, for some strange reason, my co-worker desires a slushie. Today I choose not to question the rationale behind this.
The intersection of Flinders and Spencer is always something of a wind knot as the two wind tunnels crash and tangle. This winter the wind has been fierce and determined the rip us from the face of the earth. It grabs what it can; leaves, cardboard tatters, plastic bags, polystyrene cups, scattered newspaper, unguarded hats and ill-angled umbrellas.
We stand at the corner, waiting for the lights, all anemone hair and squinting eyes.
And moments before the green man is due to appear, the wind grabs me.
With my feet stuttering along the ground I yelp as I’m dragged out onto the road.
“Just relax!” my co-worker exclaims.
“It’s not me,” I say, and reach for her arm – too slow.
With a roar the wind scoops me up and away from the Earth, flipping me head over heels. I snatch my scarf before the wind steals it, and catch a hand in the overhead tram wires.
“What are you doooing?” she cries.
“It’s not me!” Even with both arms wrapped around the cable, the wind hauls me by the feet till I’m upside down.
She’s half screeching, half laughing at me. “Wait,” she says, “wait, I’ll get help.”
I don’t think help will arrive soon enough. There’s a tram coming.
“Sorry,” I call out, “I don’t think we’re getting slushies today.”
And I let go.
The wind, pulling so hard, throws me high, a smooth sweep up over the rooftops of office towers and hotels and apartment blocks, a view of grime and air conditioning units rarely seen. It tumbles me, nauseatingly so, whirls me by glass windows and flings me into violent alley eddies, and I cover my mouth because I’m pretty sure if I throw up it will end up all over me.
It carries me through and then free of the city and all the invisible storms trapped in the streets. I stop spinning so recklessly. Tentatively, I spread my arms, and am afforded some control over which direction I face.
My phone rings. Digging around in my pocket tips me into a tumble, and I close my eyes. “Hello?”
“You let go! What did you do that for?”
“I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”
“Where are you?”
I keep my eyes closed. “I don’t know.”
“Where are you going?”
“I really don’t know.”
“How are we supposed to get you back then?”
“Maybe,” I spread my fingers and the phone plunges away, vanishing in an instant, “you’re not supposed to.”
“Where are we going?” I ask, but the wind doesn’t answer, because it is just wind, and I am only some small thing it grabbed because it could, and it will take me where it will, and I will have no choice in the matter, and it will discard me where it will, and I will have no choice in the matter, and that sounds marvellous.
I go drifting by like a child’s lost balloon, waving at school kids and leaving a whole neighbourhood’s in uproar as one dog barks at me, and so all dogs bark at me. It’s bitterly cold, but I’ve managed to tuck my top into my jeans and knot my scarf around my head. My eyes won’t stop watering from the fast and hard air, and as such I don’t see the Werribee Sewerage Farm. I smell it.
“Oh,” I quote Han Solo, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Crapcrapcrap why didn’t I take physics in high school? I can’t get the angle of my arms or legs right. No matter how I swim or flail, the wind carries me onward, and the smell gets stronger.
The farm is huge, therefore, hard to avoid. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so wild and carefree and unfettered and thrown my damn phone away. It’s close enough now the smell has become a taste, thick and sticky in the back of my throat, and the path of the wind is apparent on the surface of the processing pools.
There is no path of the wind.
There is no wind.
Oshi-