Johnny was standing on the sunlit porch of his family’s house with his head tilted back and his eyes squinched shut. It was his way of enjoying the sun without getting blinded by the light. It helped very little though. When looking away to open his eyes he couldn’t see anything just as well. Only enveloping and expanding darkness with a blazing circle in the middle.
Johnny straightened his head and breathed in. It was a perfect day. And he wanted it to stay perfect till the last minute of the day, till the very last strike of the clock at midnight.
‘That’s what I call a good reason to have my own weather”, thought Johhny.
What he meant wasn’t a figure of speech. It wasn’t a metaphor for anything, having one’s own weather. It was something that had been discovered to be in power of every individual. Everyone could create a type of weather for themselves by simply focusing on the image of what their inner self longed for to be materialized in changes of air condition, temperature, and natural phenomena. If you felt like putting on winter boots to crunch away along a snow trail, you could easily make winter for yourself. It took seconds of concentration, a clear vision, in your inner mind, of anything that you ever see outside in winter, anything that you love to wear in winter and any weather changes that make it winter for you. If you visualized it distinctly enough, in a moment you could find yourself with heavy clouds over your head, white fluffy snow under your feet and chilly air around. Your clothes would turn into those that you would normally put on to keep warm. And if you really pined for your favourite worn-out yet so dear to your heart scarf, you could wrap it around your neck and cover your mouth and nose with it right away.
From the outside it looked as if a person and the surrounding space existed separately from the visible reality. A piece of a puzzle that didn’t go with the rest. Having lots of people with various weather around them crossing each other’s way in the same place at the same time resembled a board with all the imaginable jigsaw pieces poured into one pile.
Johnny didn’t understand why this ability had been discovered in the first place. Less reasonable to him it seemed to use it. When this trend caught on, he was trying to see the motives of people who used it. He watched his friends being excited about turning summer into winter, going from drizzle to showers and then to scorching heat in seconds. He strived to comprehend the kind of joy it brought them. The more often he saw it being put in practice, the more the sense of it eluded him. When he could no longer fight curiosity and stay in darkness, Johnny began questioning everybody he knew on what this ability meant for them. They didn’t give him any coherent answers. What they did was merely shrug and say, ‘It’s fun, that’s all’. Some responded that ‘It was just something that everyone does’. Some wanted to use it because it was all the rage. Some saw it as a chance to be having a moment in the crowd. Some went with ‘It’s something new, right? So, it’s cool, you’ve got to use it’. It all seemed to Johnny so disappointing, seeing people do something that they didn’t understand the purpose of and couldn’t find a reason for. It felt as if whatever people were given, without any explanation of its origin or its purpose, they would welcome it without questioning and expect from their neighbour to do the same as, in their minds, it was the latest must-have or must-do. ‘We screen our food, we monitor our feelings, we scrutinize our wardrobe, yet we are so gullible to follow trends without asking ourselves why,’ he thought.
