It’ll be okay. We’ll all be fine.
Outside the single attic window, rain and wind tore at the world. Shingles ripped off houses. Cars and everyday household objects floated down the streets.
The water surged higher.
Downstairs, glass shattered. My parents cursed. I rushed to the window alongside my brother and sister. Below, our minivan had shoved a tree into our front porch. Across thestreet, our elderly neighbors waded into the torrential street, holding bags above their heads.
They had no attic of their own. If they stayed in their flooding home, they’d drown.
We watched our parents appear below, screaming at the couple to come inside with us. The elderly pair made their way through the debris, struggling against the current.
My parents infiltrated the dangerous waters, a frantic, seemingly hopeless endeavor. The elderly couple abandoned their bags to the water and reached for my dad. Mere feet separated them. Two yards of swelling, eddying gray water.
The elderly woman lost her footing first.
Dad lunged for her. Missed. Disappeared beneath the flood.
Mom’s scream was loud enough to pierce the storm.
Leo slammed his fist on the window. “Dad!”
A floating tree rode the waves, barely missing Mom, who started back toward the house despite the elderly man still fighting to stay upright.
An airborne branch whipped through the air, and all three of us leaped away from the window as it crashed through, opening the attic to the perilous world outside. Regardless of the danger, I scrambled to my feet and fell against the branch now penetrating the window.
Outside, the water continued to rise. Mom and the elderly man were nowhere in sight. No. No. No.
I spun and darted toward the stairs, now halfway drowned in water. I dove into the freezing, dirty surge, ignoring the bump and bustle of invisible objects beneath it.
Leo and Ali yelled at me to come back, but I ignored them, searching the front porch for any sign of life.
“Mom!” I screamed over and over, only to be answered by wind and rain and an ever-rising tide.
I slipped over something beneath me and submerged under the gritty, salty water. It seared my nose, stung my eyes, and I came up splashing. A hand grasped my wrist. Looking up through wet, salt-burned vision, I found my brother’s brown eyes and intense stare.
I have you.
Ali stood waist-deep in water on the stairs, tear-streaked and frazzled, reaching for us both. We endured the rest of the storm braced in each other’s arms, and we attended our parents’ combined funeral six weeks later—after the bodies were recovered and identified. We moved into our only living grandmother’s house in Tennessee.
That’s where I stop the story for Asher. Because the rest hurts to talk about.
Leo resorted to an opiate addiction to numb the pain. Desperate for a home and stability, Ali married the first man she seriously dated, Nicolas Sanchez, before her twenty-first birthday.
I built glass walls.
The boyfriend I found at my new school in Tennessee—my first love—died in a car accident a year later. Grandma passed from a heart attack just after I received my first admittance to college. Leo succumbed to his addiction the year following.
With each new death, my walls grew thicker and colder. I reinforced them with diamond-hard denial and steel-coated displacement that not even years of therapy have been able to strip away. I pretended away my emotional unavailability and substituted meaningful relationships with sexual satisfaction and casual acquaintances. My therapist says I developed avoidant attachment from the trauma. I just think I’m smart to protect myself.
Regardless, pathologic lessons ingrained themselves into my head:
To love is to pierce barbs into my heart—barbs adulterated with endorphins and lidocaine, so the puncture doesn’t hurt. It feels good. What hurts is the violent dislodgment, the mangled tissue left behind when the love is stolen, destroyed, killed. Echoes of the missing pieces radiate torturous pain inward. Fragments poison the bloodstream.
I no longer allow people to penetrate so deeply.
Asher is a stealth-master. He ninja-ed his way behind my walls.
His arm tightens around me. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. Definitely get why you hate storms now.”
