Oh, Meranti! (a lover of typhoons says his say)

I am not anti-Meranti. I am pro-weather. I am non-discriminatory on all fronts. With all the super things Meranti has to offer, who wouldn’t be impressed? Let me rant away in praise of her.

She plays fast and loose. She spins out of control from nothing to something special and back to nothing. She’s so rough and wild, mighty men quiver behind closed doors. She only begs for a quick kiss and a slap on their cheeks. She rattles windowpanes and roofs, pushing at the doors like the Big Bad Wolf. Wide-eyed children blow kisses from behind the safety of locked windows, watched over by even wider-eyed mothers.

Born on the eighth as an area of convection near Guam, she quickly grew into her toddlerhood as a tropical depression. By six a.m. on the tenth, she was already a teenage rebel; a tropical storm. A full twenty-four hours later, Meranti became a young but powerful typhoon lady with a small but beautiful nine-kilometre-wide eye. And after another 36 hours of growing, by the twelfth, she became a Category 5 adult, a super typhoon. A strong anticyclone above her fueled her intense desires for travel and romance. In angry 10-minute gusts of 240 km/h, and all-out tantrums of 1-minute 305 km/h gusts, Meranti went looking for a mate to spend the rest of her life with. She needed someone to have and to hold until she ran out of breath.

On the thirteenth, her first landbound love was little Itbayat in the Phillipines. She was not satisfied with him. She flirted briefly with Taiwan, grazing his arm and awkwardly fumbling a simple holding of hands manoeuvre. He had nothing special to offer her, only locked doors, empty streets, and polite shakes of the head at her advances. It was only on the fifteenth that Meranti found landfall and love over the Xiang’an District in China. And that is where she said her vows and lay herself down for better and for worse.

For Meranti is now the mother of all Typhoons, superior in every aspect. Dare I embrace her with my manly arms before it is too late? She already found a more suitable mate in some other calm-before-the-storm kind of landlubber guy.

Watch me as I uselessly swim the air - a lovestruck fool, far too weathered by time and far too late - on this, the bittersweet sixteenth day of the ninth month. All I can hold onto is the blue sky echoes of her absence. I’m the sadly calm-after-the-storm kind of guy. I can’t wait until the next typhoon comes along.