Note: if you would rather not receive these daily Sunrise Letters, you can unsubscribe from “Sunrise Letters” without fully unsubscribing from Entropical Paradise.
My cat, Edna, is yowling at my feet. She’s started doing this since we moved in; yowling like this, though she’s always been a very vocal cat. All the cat information I can find has told me to ignore it. She’s adjusting to the new space, they say.
Luckily it’s only in the mornings. Unluckily, I write in the mornings.
Last night I took my Humira, and today I awoke with a migraine and swollen glands and a cold sore sprouting on my lip. It’s as if my body immediately springs into action— my immune system resisting its suppression. If only there were some way to coax my immune system into softness, so it would stop attacking my body, I wouldn’t have to tamp it down with this medication. As I write this, the most intense pain is in my left ear. Why my ear? What is the purpose of this pain?
Not everything has a purpose, I suppose. As a writer, I always want it to mean something.
Like hurricanes. They’re supposed to mean something, right?
Here are the spaghetti models. I didn’t know what spaghetti models were until last autumn, when I had my first hurricane scare. It veered east, missing us. I wanted it to veer somewhere, and whenever I wished for it to veer away from us I felt guilty, because really I was wishing for it to veer towards another town; another place where people would undoubtedly be affected. But why should I feel guilty when my wishing has no impact on the path of a hurricane? I wish to survive the thing. That drive has always been strong in me.
When I was a child growing up in the Seattle suburbs, it rarely snowed. But one winter, when I was around nine years-old, a kind of snow hurricane came and shut down the city. My mom worked in the city and got stuck on the 520 Bridge, which spans across Lake Washington, connecting the suburbs to the city. The bridge always fascinated me. It gave the lake a double personality; choppy waters on one side and smooth, calm waters on the other. I never understood why this happened; it was magic to me. In reality, the bridge interrupts the flow of the wind across the lake, keeping one side calmer than the other.
I remember when the snow came and I remember the daycare calling my mom’s work. One by one, groups of parents came for their children. A hollow sensation of emptiness echoed inside me as I watched my peers run into their parent’s arms, wet snow toppling from hats and jackets and splattering on the floor. My mom, single, on her own, was often late, and I was usually the last to be picked up. This time she didn’t show at all; the daycare employees tried to hide their exasperation at being stuck away from home as chunky snowflakes fell outside. Eventually my neighbor came, accompanied by her daughter who also attended the daycare. I’d watched them leave a couple hours earlier.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I wanted to be in the little apartment I shared with my mom, and didn’t understand why I couldn’t sleep there without her. She appeared the next morning, ecstatic about the man who had dug out her car, grasping the hands of our neighbor, eyes wide. I knew she had spent the night at his place instead of coming home. I knew, or I thought. What’s the difference? Still, it was nice to see her so happy, her pale cheeks glowing pink from the cold. I wished I could make her that happy.
Now there’s a hurricane coming, and my mom has still been gone for over twelve years. Every memory I have of her, good or not, is colored by her death. The gun. Her handwritten notes. Everything left behind. All the choices I made in the aftermath.
That was like a hurricane, too. A storm composed itself and I couldn’t predict its force or direction, though I could certainly feels its magnetic tendrils gathering together; aiming.
There was no way to prepare, no known way to respond. No emergency management or disaster declaration. After the worst of the storm passed, more storms came, but I had to go on living my life as if my mom had died a regular death. As if she hadn’t shot herself. As if she hadn’t lied about having cancer. I had to do that not for myself, but because other treated her suicide like some sort of contagion. They wanted to contain it and wrap it in a pretty bow, so they could understand it.
We cannot really understand hurricanes, and why they happen, and where they come from, just as we can’t understand ourselves, and why we’re here, and where we have come from, or where we will go when our time is done here.
What is a hurricane but an event we cannot control; a mirror of our own vulnerability fiercely held in front of us.
I always wondered about people who lived in hurricane-prone areas. Why not leave? Leave when the hurricane is headed towards you. Or move to some other place where there are no hurricanes. Now I understand: there’s no way to tell who will be most impacted by the hurricane. There’s nowhere without hurricanes in some form or another. Wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes. Humans.
We are, in a way, hurricanes, barreling through this planet without warning. Unlike hurricanes we are sentient. We know what we are doing but we act as if we are powerless to stop ourselves.
Hurricane as theoretical lens.
Hurricane as God.
Hurricane as renewal, or warning, or sign, or (blank).
I have weathered many hurricanes.
I am a hurricane.
Sometimes I need reminding.
Sunrise Letters is my daily commitment to writing every weekday morning. These notes are unedited and unplanned. Thank you so much for reading.
I hope this hurricane, and the one in your immune system, are kind to you, even if they can’t all be.