Texas thunderstorms are the closest I have come to witnessing that which seems supernatural. The sky blackens, charred with clouds. The rain does not gradually enter but pours, like God has tipped over buckets in God’s haste out the front door. Flashes of lightning fork downward almost too perfectly to believe it is real, and not the drawing we make to demonstrate what it might look like. Here the sky is so big you can smell and feel the thunder coming, pass over you and through you, and leave its scorching echo behind.
You think the world is going to drown, that there simply cannot be enough earth to absorb this kind of water, that it will rise and keep rising, it will never stop. Streams of water slip off the eaves of the house, buckets fill and overflow. Everything is quiet but the storm.
It is perhaps not surprising that I want this experience to melt into metaphor for my own life. I want to conjure the image for you and say - this is what it is like to have anxiety rise in your chest, pressing against your bones until you cannot be sure that any oxygen you release will come back to you. If you breathe, you think, you might drown. At some points the anxiety is thick like the rainfall. Who knows why I worry, really, there are no drops of worry about specific things even if I can make a list of things that are reasonable to worry about.
Instead it is a stream of water slipping over the eaves of my heart. It puddles and splashes and splatters. It takes my concentration, it takes up space I had promised to give to listening to others, to practicing guitar or watching birds or building blocks. It gushes over the banks of the stream beds I have already built for it: now I am awake at 2am, 4am, now I am restless and tossing side to side, now I am naming things fast and furious to God like I believe God has in fact forgotten the minute details of my life. I name things that are six years old. I name the smell of the ice machine in the NICU waiting room, its loud clank and rattle. I name the rounded desk where you showed your ID to prove you were somebody’s mother. I name the first scope down his throat the first prognosis the first night asleep on the vent on his back.
In the anxious rain there is no past, no present, no future distinct from each other. What is past is present here, the future settled next to the settled, the complete. Am I talking about something from a long time ago? Or something not yet come? I do not know. The rain pours off my heart, into the pit of my stomach. My heart keeps beating, faithful muscle that it is, while all around it puddles grow and splash and deepen.
I am trying to explain an inexplicable thing: I still wear the stories of six years ago around me, they fall in with the rain of more contemporary worries, school supply lists and COVID protocols, safety and challenge, the state of the world and each other. In the anxious rain the air is thick and wet, the sky teems with clouds, and the heart beats on.
This is poetry. <3
This is poetry. <3