3am after the storm

I still think about that day, or night I suppose. I still lie awake at night and replay it, wondering what I should’ve done, wondering about the scenarios in which I realistically could’ve avoided it.  When I first ran into the people that were a part of that night, when I ran into them here in the after that is, it made me sweat. It’s a strange sort of panic, my face turned red while my lungs inhaled remembrance and exhaled regret. It still happens now and again, though I pretend it does not.

It was my hurricane. Please don’t think I take that metaphor lightly, I don’t.

Like with hurricanes, I had warning. I knew it was coming and I tried, oh I tried to stave it off.  I saw the bleeding and pressed gauze over the wound and taped the bandage against my skin. And then I kept movng, denying my mind when it whispered that I should check the dressing again - that it might have bled through, that it needed more attention than I was giving it.

But I didn’t check it again until it was too late. And then the hurricane set in and I no longer denied the fear and pain and helplessness.

But now, here in the after, the hurricane is over and residents are banding together to find a way forward and through and upwards.   This wound is healed, though it did not leave a scar to prove the pain, to justify the fear, or to make sense of it all. I can’t walk with my head held high when I remember the hurricane, it is still too fresh and somehow soaked with shame. It is a dearly held lie of mine that it’s always okay, even when it’s not.  (Pride can kill, you see.) But I try not to think of my hurricane during the day, and at night... well, I try to let it teach me.

Perhaps I will learn to recognize a wound before it drains me.

Perhaps I will.