I SIT up in bed, wide-awake, surrounded by darkness. I can’t breathe for a moment, and the wispy tendrils of my nightmare, although it could have been a flashback, are still shrouding me and my wrists tingle uncomfortably. Once I realize that I am not dying, that I am alive, I feel an immediate and overwhelming relief. My breath is shaky as I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on where I am. I am in my bed. I am okay. I am alive. Thank goodness.
The sky outside glows with a flash of lightning, and I look out the window as thunder booms. It’s a true summer storm, the kind that can shake people from the deepest slumber, or in my case, free them from the nightmares of their darkest moments. I clamber out of bed and head for the beanbag under the window, sitting in it and staring outside for a few minutes.
I haven’t heard a storm like this in a very long time. It’s been months. I probably heard, or more accurately noticed, thunder before I lost my hand. It’s pleasant. I’d forgotten about the way thunder shatters the silence of the night. It’s almost musical. This is a good storm. It’s loud and powerful and angry.
It’s funny actually, how you can be the very center of your own universe, and be so involved with yourself. But nature honestly doesn’t give a shit. It carries on, absolutely regardless of how much you hurt. It storms and rages but softens and smiles after. It just keeps on trucking. It’s so much bigger than you and cannot stop for something so small. The ocean does not stop because a single rock is displaced, so why, then, would nature wait?
With those thoughts in mind, I bolt out of my bed and race to my desk, opening drawers and looking for my emptiest notepad and a pencil. The clock glows behind me, advertising the time of 3:22 a.m.
By 3:54 a.m., I’ve written a poem. I have to sit back in shock. I’ve done it. I finally wrote a poem. My hand is cramping and sore, but it’s worth it. An entire poem. I can’t believe it. I’ve written an entire poem. It’s incredibly strange… to find that I can still write. Granted, it’s sloppy, and the handwriting is pathetic, though I can improve. I can get my act together. I can adapt. Darwin might have been onto something after all. I am thankful that it took a crazy thunderstorm to snap me out of a proverbial drought of nonwriting.
It quickly becomes a mantra. I repeat it to myself while I walk circles around my bedroom, trying to accept it while Sarah watches sleepily from the bed with her ears perked. I read it about seventy times, at least.
I’m in a miniature shock, it’s an actual poem.
Clouds roll in, a distant din, there is something coming.
Lightning flashes, thunder crashes, the wind and rain celebrate.
We find it there, a charge in the air, as the world becomes fresh
again.
The grass stands tall, bearing it all, while hell storms all around.
The skies clear, sunshine is near, the muddy roads are freed.
We feel alright in the oncoming night, when silence will blanket
the Earth.
But then in the dark the devil finds its mark, and it all begins
again.
Is it a curse when we’ve survived worse, as Mother Nature
screams her fury?
Huddling together, we’ll face whatever may come to us in the
morning.
I can’t even focus on the fact that it rhymes, despite my blatant loathing of the matching words. I’ll grow to hate the scheme eventually, but I will be forever indebted to the poem for bringing me back.
It isn’t until seven more minutes have passed that I realize the calm before the storm wasn’t metaphorical as I was expecting. It’s a legitimate storm. How perfect. All semblance of calm is gone, but so is another layer of depression. I feel a strange freedom as words begin to lose their sense of foreignness.
I sit in the beanbag as more thunder rattles the windowpanes. My notepad quickly fills with lines, and I know I’ll be spending time later, during the actual day, crafting poems and refining them to my usual standards. They won’t be good yet. I’m so far out of practice with the way words interact, but I’m awkwardly full of determination because I know I can do it.
Ten minutes later, I’m gently shaking my mom’s shoulder, whispering urgently. She snaps awake immediately, the only woman in the world able to sleep through the recently passed storm but wake up at the mere hint of her daughter’s voice. She is nothing less than a professional mother. But to be fair, she’s been at it for quite a while. And I’ve given her some challenges as far as being her daughter goes.
“What’s wrong?” Her eyes fill with worry as I stand over her, and I can only giggle. After a minute I realize that it’s probably disconcerting, so I stop and hand her the poem that is crumpled in my fist, with sweat and smeared pencil lines already coating the creases.
She turns on the bedside lamp and rapidly scans the sheet of paper with the pathetic handwriting scrawled across it. My mom starts to cry a little, and the remaining creases fill with the saline dripping from her face.
“You did it,” she murmurs.
“I did it,” I echo. My voice has an undeniable joy to it. “I will go back to bed shortly,” I start, “but can I staple this one to the corkboard?” We go downstairs together, and my poem secures a position in the corner.
Over the years, the corkboard in our kitchen has become host to a number of poems, ones I’ve enjoyed so much that I couldn’t let them go, and so I tacked them up to remember them. Now, my new poem is up there. My 4:00 a.m. root beer tastes like victory and carbonated goodness. As I leave the kitchen to go back up to my bedroom, I turn back to give my mom a hug.
She puts a date on the bottom of the poem. When she turns and sees me glowering at her for touching my work, she laughs, a pure crystalline jingle that sounds rusty to the both of us. I keep forgetting how hard this has been on her too. She almost lost a daughter a few different times. At some point, she kind of did. I think now that she might have one back but the better, battle-worn one I like being.
When my mom’s laugh cuts off, she remarks quietly, “I had almost forgotten what that felt like. It’s been a while. And stop looking at me like that, Carter Alice. I want to remember the date that I feel like you really came back to me. Do you have a title for it? I can write one in if you want. I want to remember this, the day and moment your purpose came back.” Her tone whips back and forth from chastising to stern to soft. Her gaze never leaves my face.
I squint at the poem for a moment before coming up with the perfect title. “Call it ‘The Obligatory Rhyming Poem of UGH.’”
“Of what?” Confusion lines my mother’s face, and I grin, getting ready to go into a long-winded explanation.
“‘The Obligatory Rhyming Poem of UGH.’ Ugh being U-G-H, like an annoyed sigh that wholly represents my utter despisal of rhyming poems and the like.” I’m fairly certain my sentences are running on and together, but I don’t care. I’m on a roll. No, I’m soaring on rounded bread. That’s much more like it. I continue, enunciating the primal sound. “UGH, like an uuuuuuuuuuggghhhhhhh kind of noise.”
My mom just nods and pencils it in. She’s probably just humoring me. I’m positive she knows how to spell “ugh.” I sigh and look one more time at the poem, full of my despised writing scheme. Then I start to laugh, harder than my mom was. I probably sound like a lunatic, but I’m beyond any semblance of caring. Tears are freely climbing down my face as I try to contain the amusement that is bubbling from my very core.
I laugh until my sides hurt, and then I laugh some more, before I manage to glance at my mom, who’s been watching me with an expression somewhere between concern and bemusement. “You said that you wanted to remember the exact moment when I got my purpose back, right?” I choke out. “But I’m pretty sure you got the date wrong.”
My mom rushes to the page-a-day calendar, and sure enough, I’m right. She blushes and joins me in fresh peals of laughter. I manage to cease it shortly after it occurs to me that we might wake up some neighbors. I suspect the neighbors think I’m crazy, but I don’t really care, because I’m not trying to impress them.
When I sit up from the position on the floor that I slumped to when I started laughing, my mom is staring at the poem, hovering near it with her hand poised in the air, preparing to scribble on it. The first writing utensil she grabbed was a pen. “Just add a plus one to the date,” I cackle, and when my mom looks at me, I can see that she was already doing it. We start to snicker again, now at the fact that we apparently share a brain. I wonder how that happens, sharing a brain. Probably prolonged exposure to another person.
I yawn suddenly, and my mom does too. The memories of my nightmare flood back, and I feel wide-awake again. I stiffen a little, and my mom notices right away. She gently prods me until I tell her, and then I go write about it in the red journal. She asks me if I’ve ever had nightmares or flashbacks like those before, and I tell her the honest truth, that the nightmare was the first. I’m suddenly terrified to go back to sleep, but my body disagrees, and I stumble back upstairs, my mother’s supportive hand on my shoulder.
As I try to get comfortable, my mom sits next to me and gently brushes my hair, which has gotten shaggy in the past weeks, away from my forehead before kissing it. I whine at her a little, and she only replies that she is glad to have me back again before she goes to the door and closes it, sealing me in a box of utter darkness. Before I can panic, I fall asleep, exhausted. Thankfully, the next sleep is a dreamless one.