The Weight of a Whisper

When I was seven, my grandfather taught me how to tell if a storm was coming by watching the birds on the telephone lines behind our house. He told me they were waiting for the air to tell them where to go. I spent hours staring at them, wondering if they were talking to each other or just holding onto the wire so they wouldn’t blow away. I remember the way they leaned into one another, two small shapes against a sky that looked like bruised fruit. It seemed to me then that the world was held together by these tiny, quiet agreements—the way one creature decides to lean against another when the wind picks up. We grow up thinking we must be sturdy and solitary to survive the gale, forgetting that the most resilient things are often the ones that know how to share the burden of the breeze. Does the wind feel different when you are not standing alone?

Sarvenaz Saadat has taken this beautiful image titled Lovers. It captures that same fragile, necessary closeness I remember from the wires behind my grandfather’s house. Can you feel the stillness they have carved out for themselves in the middle of the storm?