Rainbows & Lightning Bolts—A Story Series

Photo by eMMe

Lightning bolts change things. They are an electric current. And when an electric current enters a human body it can kill or restart the heart if it has stopped. And if the person is A Me walking around with a heart that hasn’t emotionally breathed in decades, a lightning bolt will toss the life into the sky and no one knows if it’ll ever land to live semi-normally again.
          But at least the heart is breathing again, right? At least the heart is breathing again **[INSERT EYEROLL]**

It all started on a cold winter’s eve five years ago, in a room full of strangers with a few friends telling stories for their supper. This event had been modeled after a Newfoundland tradition called "mummering." Townspeople in Newfoundland communities dress in costume, perform the fool door-to-door and are served food and drinks for the effort.

In the frigid, boring extremes of the Midwest, we work to come up with things to do that don't involve expanding our bums or re-binging Longmeyer on Netflix for the fourth time. On these many, many cold nights, we could stay home having glorious sex, the kind we tend not to remember from our youth, but instead cabin fever sets in and we either stumble out of our comfy zones or take long winter's naps aided by vats of chamomile tea.
          At this February juncture, I’m in full-throttle zombie-mode, most days lost in very efficient to-do lists filled with tasks designed to make me appear as though all is very well in my neighborhood, conveying I’m one of the “good ones” and not a “bad one.” Taxes are paid on time, the leaves are meticulously collected from the lawn each fall, and when there’s laundry I wash it in private, drowning my dirty linens in memory bleach so as to never show my ass in public.

I am unintentionally-non-aware this zombie-state is killing me one organ at a time, my heart the choir director instructing each not-vital-to-existence member to suffocate right along with her. I misplace my uterus and gallbladder during this process, both holding hands until the end as the Great Sea of Nothing absorbs them along with their importance. The Great Sea of Nothing is what I call the place that takes what was once oh-so-very-important—hopes, dreams, fluid limbs, glorious sex, dancing for no reason at all—and hides them so they don't occupy thoughts that need to be engaged in perfecting a "To Do List Life."

Glug-glug.

My hair thins, I am perpetually tired, my skin dry, and a mysterious shudder can be felt deep in my core when I lie in bed at night. I tear the house apart searching for what is creating this vibration. It has to be the furnace, the washing machine, the refrigerator, the well pump, a dehumidifier…When these are found not to be the cause, I decide someone is illegally fracking in the area and my house will one day join my gallbladder and uterus in that Great Sea of Nothing via aquifer rapids eroding glacier deposits beneath my feet.

Swooooooshhhhh...

I am terrified nearly every moment of every day, the persistent vibration following me out of the house and into my car, to work, and showing up as I check items off my to-do list and good-person smile through my every day.

And so there I am, lounging on a pile of coats during another dreary February night, listening to life stories, poems, music, and comedy, performed by friends and mostly strangers when a lightning bolt soundlessly strikes—a vibrant rainbow jagger-splitting the woman speaking at an angle left-to-right.

I watch this curious event unfold as it slow-motion changes my life instantly. It is gorgeous and terrifying. My tongue reflexively moves back and forth in my mouth, I whisper the ABCs under my breath, my name...what is my name??? Some part of my brain has managed to remember the signs for stroke, though my name wanders in the Great Sea with my uterus. I stand up as inconspicuously as possible to move my arms and legs. Nothing aside from my old lady tits droops and everything works with regular-ancient creakiness. I sit back down as inconspicuously as before and resume watching the odd rainbow-hued lightning bolt.

The woman telling her story I have known since my twentieth year, back when my heart was still emotionally breathing and I believed there were eons of life road that would carry me off to many splendid things, most of them on sunny beaches and nowhere near a plain or prairie. The story she has been sharing is one I had known about, it having occurred around the time we met.

The lightning bolt sashays to a finish, all at once clearing me of the rest of what I know, the volt of electricity zapping what was before as though it a leaf on my meticulous lawn incinerated to ash.

The room full of guests applauds while I query my partner of nearly-thirty years about the friend (now stranger's) story.

“What’s Great America?”
He laughs.
“I have no idea…was America ever great?”
“No. I’m asking about the story…What’s Great America?”
The laughter ebbs as he realizes I'm not joking.
“You know, up in Gurnee, just north of here. Didn’t you take the kids there at some point? That amusement park.”
“What’s an amusement park?”

Those questions erupting from that one random lightning bolt moment on a pile of coats five years ago evaporated my To Do List Life. The old life didn't fall into that Great Sea of Nothing, that old life no longer exists. And at the same time, that rainbow-hued lightning bolt split open and illuminated my Great Sea of Nothing and I've been seeking and sorting through what's been quivering on the bottom ever since.

But at least my heart is breathing again, right?