Waking up in the middle of a storm reminds me of the wonderful chaos of drums. It is as pleasantly confusing as a parade: you don’t know where you are, you feel the noise in your skin, you feel the urge to do everything all at once. You don’t even know if it’s morning already, everything is dark and tentative as dusk or dawn.
If you are lucky, you’d get a phone call telling you that due to bad weather, work has been cancelled. The storm is supposed to force you to stay at home – thus the cancellation of work or class – but then you go berserk and plan your day as if it’s a surprise weekend, a holiday celebrating the death of a hero, or the martyrdom of a saint (or the sainthood of a martyr). What is there to do in a day of ruthless rain? Is it a book of poetry, or plainly the couch, or poetry and the couch? Good food, maybe, or sex? Is it junkfood and tv, or junkfood in the movie house? Sex with a fuck buddy or a stranger? In my couch, or in the movie house?
The rain remains relentless, and your plans are still vague, but then you realize it’s midday already, although everything remains as hazily dim as your plans. You stay in bed, and you let your imagination plan the unfolding of the day for you. When it starts looking like a porn movie, you just doze off to catch the wisp of a dream. Or you just lie in the couch, feeling plain lazy, too lazy, to get up and get things going. You wake up again, and the darkness suddenly seems permanent. You panic a little, but then you begin feeling paralyzed by hunger.
(In the refrigerator, you find: a plastic cup of cottage cheese, a bag of blueberry bagel, bottles of whatever, butter and a rack of other neighborly spreads, and in a large bowl, which occupies a quarter of the available space, you discover a greenish, purplish empire, dusty and primordial; it used to be food, but now it’s a toxic invader spreading as quickly as, pardon the racism, the Chinese civilization. In the vegetable rack, a different universe: everything is literally growing, a rainforest in the making.)
You grab from the ref things that are still surprisingly edible, and you make a mental note to raze the purple and green empire and the rainforest. You eat in the couch while watching tv, and then you switch it off to listen to the news in the radio. A child died today because of the floods, and an old lady was reported missing. The child’s body was found in a creek, and the old lady was later (much, much later) seen inside the mall, looking for love, or beauty, or maybe both.
A black out shuts off the radio and interrupts your eating. With nothing to do, you lie again in the couch. In the darkness, you feel confused: should you start asking how your own life would unravel, or should you pray for the weather to remain just how it is now?
