is there anyone else out there who wakes up just before a thunderstorm?

i generally sleep through every night except when It happens, when i wake up for absolutely no reason in the dead of the night and suddenly, five minutes later, it begins to storm. this started happening after lightning struck my house when i was about 12 or 13 and has continued since then. it could be that i have an irrational fear of thunderstorms (i do) but it amazes me that it carries over into my sleep. i feel like i could cultivate this into some kind of superpower.

that's all.

i'm sort of drunk

i remember the first time i rode in an airplane i was so amazed that there were phones up there that worked. 8 billion feet above sea level (so it seems) but i can still talk to my grandma about her hamburger casserole. i want to feel as though i am in a different universe but the man next to me is reading Esquire and lindsay lohan is on the cover. "no," i want to say. "no, that is down there and we are up here" but the reality is that we might be elevated in theory but we're still down there on the ground. i think about what i will eat when i land in chicago. the man next to me invites me to drink with him in the lounge. i smile toothily and hope it looks fake enough to convince him that, somewhere in the world, someone is fucking someone else's husband but it's not going to happen in O'Hare between 2pm-4pm on a Tuesday afternoon. i wonder if someday my nonexistent husband will ask a 22-year-old to drink with him on his layover to his way to our nonexistent son's birthday party. i think, monogamy is a dream. i think, i don't want to die alone. he drones on and on about Orange County and i say things like "geez" and "wow" and "i bet it's really pretty there, yeah, really nice yeah" and when the plan lands i pretend that i see my friend way up there in Aisle 7 and run away.

on my way back home i sit next to an average-looking woman who tells me she is 32. she tells me, "don't worry if you haven't met anyone by the time you're 30. i've traveled Europe, i've done what i wanted to do, things i couldn't have done with a man in my life!" but something in her eyes tells me she's lying, that she did these things because she had to, because she had to do something to fight off those strange feelings of loneliness that made her wake up sweating in the early hours of the morning, made her turn off old black-and-white films when things began to turn out just fine in the end. she tells me she is marrying the "man of her dreams" next month and that she has seen the world and now she's ready to settle down. i think, why is marrying settling down? can we still travel while married? i think maybe being married is like crossing a precarious wooden bridge that suddenly breaks, sending you tumbling down to the bottom, where you are stuck. you are dead or you are alive. the sun shines on you at varied intervals.

show me survival in semi-darkness, that love exists equally in valleys and mountaintops. i'm tired of mouths that bleed sonnets and drunken promises. i'm 10,000 miles above sea level and i only see water and clouds, a phone connected to air.

two old ladies are crossing the street with their walkers held unsteadily before them. they place their faith in five feet of twisted metal and red, painted handles. their fragile bodies are hunched forward and i can see the tops of their permed, white-blue hair, thin spirals protecting even thinner skin. an impatient man is honking, honking, honking and i want to scream, "goddammit man these ladies are trying to cross the street" but i don't and we all stand huddled on the sidewalk holding our breaths until they make it across, inching, always inching, but yet somehow they arrive safely at the opposite side of the street, oblivious to the chaos they just created. i stare at them until an inevitable "what's your problem, lady?" and i think, slow down, man. we have all the time in the world.

youth #2

used to be, the cows laid down and we knew it would rain. now i check the internet, and it tells me there will be scattered showers.

youth

used to be, we looked up at the sky at night and all we saw were stars and maybe sometimes we thought they were beautiful but mostly we were bored. we roamed the dark country streets at night, creating danger out of shadows, imagining ghosts lurking in corners of tree trunks and maybe the devil himself, crouched in the cornfield, beckoning to us with arms made of willowy cornstalks. we talked in hushed tones and crept with silent feet, and when cars came whisking by -- and they always whisked by, on Mountain Road -- we took cover, lunging behind parked cars or bushes and peeking out cautiously after the car passed.

one night we heard a car and we performed our usual ritual, throwing ourselves behind a huge pine tree. it was a station wagon, one of those kinds with the brown paneled wood -- Jen punched my arm -- and it was going so fast that the wheels were sparking, and i thought for sure it was a vehicle to another world. i imagined this car took the devil home from the cornstalks. he lived on Whiskey Springs Road, behind the boulders that framed the narrow path up the mountain, the path we took to my uncle's each Fourth of July. i imagined he stared at me through watery yellow eyes as i looked out the window at a veiled forest.