A War in the Sky

I think most people like fireworks. They are big and loud and beautiful, the kind of thing that makes the whole sky feel like it is putting on a show just for you. I have never been able to feel that way about them. Even as a kid I flinched at the sound, and somehow that flinch never grew out of me the way it was supposed to. I know children are allowed to be scared of loud noises, but there is something embarrassing about still being scared of them as an adult, about still hearing a firework and thinking, for half a second, that it was a gunshot.

I think the truth is that fireworks were never really the problem. It is thunderstorms that have always undone me. There is something about the way a storm makes the whole world shake that I have never been able to sit still with, the windows rattling in their frames, the trees swaying like they are being pushed by something that wants them down, the sky echoing across the earth in a way that feels less like weather and more like a warning. Everyone else seems to have made peace with it. I never have. It has always felt to me like a disaster that everyone simply agreed to call normal.

That was the kind of night it was when it started. I had checked the forecast before bed, the way I always do, because if I know a storm is coming I can put in my soundproof headphones and sleep through most of it without ever really knowing it happened. But the forecast said nothing about rain, so I went to sleep without them, and somewhere in the middle of the night the thunder woke me up anyway. I lay there for a moment just listening to it build, and then I did the thing I have always done since I was a kid, since there was never really anyone around to teach me another way to cope. I got up and climbed into the wardrobe in my room, the old wooden one that used to belong to my grandmother, and I pulled the doors shut behind me.

I know hiding does not make a storm go away. I know it does not make me any less afraid the next time one comes. But there has always been something to the logic of it that my body believes even when my mind knows better, the same logic a kid uses when they pull a blanket over their head because a monster cannot get you if it cannot see you, or the way people joke about a T. rex not being able to find you if you just stay still enough. I know none of that is true. I know it anyway. So I sat there in the dark with my knees pulled up to my chest, waiting the way I always wait, telling myself that if I could just be patient the storm would pass like it always does.

After a while my legs started to cramp. There are only so many ways to sit comfortably in a wardrobe built for coats and not for people, and after what felt like hours I had run out of positions that did not ache. I was just starting to shift toward the door, thinking about cracking it open enough to stretch out a little, when I heard something that sounded like screaming somewhere outside. It was distant and strange, half swallowed by the thunder, and I could not tell if it was real or if it was just the storm doing what storms do, turning every ordinary sound into something worse. Either way it was enough to make me go still again. I know hiding does not actually help me understand what is happening around me. If anything it does the opposite, since I cannot see or hear anything clearly from inside a closed wardrobe. But not knowing has always felt safer to me than finding out, so I stayed where I was and told myself it was nothing.

It was not long after that when I noticed how warm it had gotten. At first I assumed it was just my own fault, since I had been curled up in a small enclosed space for hours wrapped in a blanket with barely any room to move, and it made sense that my body would eventually overheat. But the air kept changing in a way that had nothing to do with my own body heat. It grew thick and hard to pull into my lungs, and underneath the smell of old wood and dust I started to notice something sharper, something that did not belong. When I reached for the handle to finally push the door open, it was hot enough that I pulled my hand back before I even registered what I was feeling. I tried again through the sleeve of my sweatshirt, just to be sure I had not imagined it, and it was just as hot the second time.

For the first time in my life, the one place that had always made me feel safe did not feel safe anymore. I sat there for a moment caught between two versions of the same fear, staying inside where at least I understood what I was afraid of, or opening the door into whatever was waiting for me on the other side. But there was never really a choice in it once I let myself think it through. Staying inside meant staying inside a wardrobe that was slowly filling with heat and smoke, and no amount of comfort in familiarity was going to change what that eventually meant for me. So I made myself open it.

My bedroom was not on fire yet, but the hallway outside it was, and there was no version of leaving through the front of the apartment that did not mean walking straight into it. The only way left was the window, and the window meant three floors of empty air between me and the ground. I threw it open anyway, gasping for the air on the other side of all that smoke, and the second I did, lightning split the sky and the thunder came right behind it, loud enough that my whole body flinched backward before I could stop it. I remember thinking, even in the middle of everything, that it was almost funny. My apartment was burning around me and I was still afraid of the storm.

For a moment I felt genuinely caught between the two things, the fire behind me and the storm in front of me, and it did not feel like there was anywhere left that counted as safe. I do not remember exactly how much time passed between opening that window and the firefighters reaching me, only pieces of it, someone wrapping a blanket around my shoulders, the sound of my own coughing, the feeling of sitting down on a curb in clothes that were soaked through from both the rain and the hoses. Mostly what I remember is watching. I watched the firefighters walk into smoke that everyone else was running from. I watched the water hit the building over and over until the flames that had looked unstoppable only minutes earlier began to shrink back down into something smaller.

Someone standing near me, I never found out if they were a firefighter or just another person who had gathered outside to watch, said that if it had not been for the rain, the fire probably would have jumped to the buildings next door before anyone could stop it. The storm had bought the firefighters time they would not have had otherwise. I do not know why that sentence settled into me the way it did, but it did, and I have not been able to shake it since.

I do not think I will ever stop flinching at thunder. I do not think one night changes something that has been part of me since I was a kid. But sitting there wrapped in that blanket, I stopped watching the building and started watching the sky instead, because somewhere in the middle of all that noise and smoke, it stopped looking like a disaster and started looking like something else entirely. The flames kept climbing against the dark, orange and gold and moving like they had a will of their own, and every time they reached higher the rain came down harder to meet them, like the sky itself had taken offense and decided to answer back. The lightning would tear across everything for just a second, long enough to light up the whole street in white, and in that flash the fire looked less like something burning and more like something standing its ground. Then the light would disappear and the thunder would roll in right behind it, low and heavy, shaking through the ground and up into my chest, and the flames would waver under the weight of it before pushing back up again through the smoke and the steam.

It looked like a battle, the kind I imagine people must have seen centuries ago when they believed the sky itself could grieve or rage, when a storm was treated like a living thing with its own will rather than just weather passing through. The fire had this stubborn, furious light to it, refusing to go down without taking something with it, and the storm came at it again and again, wave after wave of rain and thunder and that white cracking light, like it had decided this fire did not belong to the night and it was going to make sure of that itself. I sat there and watched two things I had spent my whole life being afraid of turn into something I could no look away from, two forces so much bigger than me, throwing everything they had at each other in the middle of the sky and the street and the wreck of my own home, and for the first time in my life I understood what people meant when they said something terrible could also be beautiful.

I do not think I had ever really looked at a storm before that night. I had only ever hidden from one. But watching the lightning answer the fire, watching the rain come down like it meant to win, I finally saw what had been happening above my head my entire life every time I closed the wardrobe door and told myself I was safe. I had no idea the sky could look like that. I had no idea it could be so beautiful.