Thunder

It’s been a long time since you heard thunder—you don’t get that on the west coast and you’re pretty sure you never had any in New Zealand—and it’s coming down steady now, outside in the wet dark green. It’s the middle of the night and you are wide awake, deciding whether to sneak downstairs in your underwear to stick your head out the door or to stay comfy in here and get under the covers and turn out the light to listen.

We have Netflix and the internet now but aside from the quality and pixelation of the distractions being up in the middle of the night is the same same same: too awake to fall asleep, too tired to do anything but think about how long the night is and how many more hours of it there are. It’s at times like these where you can see how it would be sort of helpful to be a drinker–much more romantic to be contemplating the rain with a wineglass in hand instead of a laptop. Your movie is watched, your email is checked, and your Skype is scrutinized for any signs that the internet in Darfur is cooperating today in the service of long-distance love. Your face has been stared at in the mirror for a shameful self-obsessed length of time. You guess some people stop pretending that they are a character in a book or a song or a story, when they hit their thirties; you guess some people stop describing themselves to themselves at two in the morning, gathering adjectives and reflecting them back, but you probably never will. There is the babyish curl in the middle of the forehead, there are the brand new wrinkles, there is the nose that will not be ignored. You gaze and parse for minutes at a time, and why not: you have all night.

It really rains here—not the felted passive-aggressive barely-there drizzle of Seattle, not the brisk and businesslike windblown patter of Wellington. There’s not only thunder but big scary lightning, here, and you wonder what the iguanas do when it gets like this. Hide under bushes, maybe, or can they climb trees? Tomorrow, if it keeps up like this, there will be big puddles in the manicured lawns and small white egrets will fish right up against the overlarge hotels. Tomorrow you’ll take a walk, just to stretch your legs and for something to do, and you’ll be sweating before you reach the end of the block.

You’d like to think it’s not too late, you’d like to believe the story you’re telling hasn’t come to its climax, that the plot has only begun to pick up its skirts and gather steam. You missed your chance to be a child prodigy and the expiration date for being a bright young thing has well and truly passed (maybe when you were in grad school or perhaps during all those afternoons you used to spend at REI?). Hilariously you have no template for this time, when you am supposed to be well and truly an adult (thirtysomething!) because none of your old stories fit anymore, they don’t look anything like you, no matter how often you look in the mirror. Everything exciting is supposed to happen when you’re young and wrinkle-free and then you’ve got fifty years of happily ever after—but after what? What if you’re getting younger as you get older, what if you’re getting braver and more interesting as the gray hairs pile up and you can remember more than one decade quite clearly now. What then? What now?

It’s just bashing down outside. You’re going to run out to the front porch not even long enough to get really wet—just enough to appreciate the soft quiet bed and the thunder and the rest of the hours of the middle of the night.