Pure adrenaline.

Oooookayyyyy so Queens just cracked open and tried to kill all its inhabitants.

I don't know how it went down in any other areas, but where I am, the biggest and worst thunderstorm I have ever seen just passed through.

Before I explain this, let me just say two things:

Number one - I. Sleep. Through. ANYTHING. Earthquakes, screaming arguments, parties, minor attacks to my person -- there's simply no waking me up. My friends can attest to this.

Number two - I'm not even AFRAID of lightning. I have seen that it is a frightening thing for other creatures, such as dogs and children and sometimes loud screechy girlfriends, but it's never struck me as anything particularly scary.

Until tonight.

I'm dead asleep, it's maybe 2:45 and I wake up sort of confused, not completely sure what's woken me up...and I hear rain. This confuses me further, as it was just drizzling when I went I went to sleep, and this sounds more serious, like legit rain. I'm also confused as to how rain woke me up -- I am from Portland, after all -- when I hear some distant traces of thunder. Ah yes. Thunder. That would make sense. (I guess I should also admit here that I'd transitioned from reading in bed with the lights on, to falling asleep in bed with the lights on, to waking back up with the lights on, so my room was fully lit up. I imagine that played a part in my waking up as well.)

So I'm still lying there, just listening to the now torrential downpour, and the thunder, and counting the time between the dull cracks to the flashes of light illuminating my windows, and I'm not an idiot, so I notice the storm is getting closer. The sounds of the thunder are getting sharper, the flares of lightning are getting brighter and longer, and the time between them is decreasing. I'm not a weather expert or anything, but this storm is getting clooooooose to me. It's now at a volume where going back to sleep is not a possibility. But again, I'm not afraid of lightning, so I'm not scared. I'm just lying here marveling, wondering how close it's gonna get. And at this point we're at like, three seconds between lightning and thunder.

So since sleep is off the table, I get up and wander into the living room, where the windows actually look out on something (versus my windows which have these papery screens in front of them that I've not yet fully figured out) to see what's going on outside. Our windows are thrown completely open, as always, and the smell of rain is THICK on the air. It's basically a flash flood out there. But it no longer smells like actual rain, it smells like dirt and water and grass and...storm, basically. Everything is flooding around in the streets and on the sidewalks, and when the lightning strikes, everything is lighting up. It's down to one or two seconds, sometimes less, and I'm feeling a little paralyzed in the living room, so I go back to my bed and try to lie down. Still...not scared, but getting a little panicky flutters in my chest. And the counting seconds thing has sort of stopped helping me at this point, because I've realized it's only fun when the storm is moving. Once it gets where it's going, and that place is where I am, counting seconds is no longer reassuring. When you go from five seconds to four, to three, to two, to one, to less than one, to zero zero zero zero ZEEEERRRRROOOOO why am I counting seconds like an asshole, I am IN this storm! Cue terror.

The lighting sounds like big electrical rips at this point, and even though I can't see it, I can feel it because the thunder is literally shaking the building. There'd be the shortest instant of white light and then the thunder would overlap it with this deep, extended cracking that I can only describe as a tree being ripped in half. A sapling that gets all its sap boiled as it tears apart. So lying down starts to feel like inaction because these are the loudest and biggest thunderbolts I've ever heard, and car alarms are going off and the rain is still coming down thick like a monsoon, and my heartbeat is getting pretty intense. And I'm basically like a horse in a barn, like tossing my head and rolling my eyes, pawing at the ground and braying.

So I kind of ease off my bed, jolting heavily each time the thunder and lightning go off SIMULTANEOUSLY because HOLY FUCK I am in the direct middle of this storm! But I'm still instinctively starting to count seconds in between like an idiot because that is my knowledge of thunderstorms. That is all I know how to do. I know I'm not supposed to get hit by lightning, and I will know how far away the storm is as it's hitting me with its lightning: zero miles. How very helpful.

And in the living room, also standing around in paralyzed terror, is my roommate Allyson. We're both half in and half out of our bedrooms, half embarrassed to have been caught out of bed by the other one during a storm, and half relieved that the apocalypse has so far spared one other human. So we're like caaaaaaasually talking about how fucking terrifying this insane storm is, and the zero second lightning bolts have been taking a brief hiatus -- we're back to the half-second or one-second lightning bolts, and I've used my highly-tuned weather knowledge to infer that the storm is now RETREATING, that I've driven it off with my counting seconds and my...not...getting hit by lightning. Or whatever. And I'm still terrified, but I'm hiding it pretty well in my conversation with Allyson until all of a sudden, the biggest crack yet RIPS through the room, like floor-shaking, heart-rending thunder, and it's enough to scare us both fully into the room and toward the couch. And we're both laughing at each other's reactions, laughing it off, trying to shake it off when right on the tails of the other one, another HUGE crack echoes at the exact same time as this enormous bolt of lightning. Basically the sound you'd imagine if your house was being ripped out of the ground.

And that is how I came to be in the middle of my living room clutching an almost-complete stranger and scuh-REAMING at the top of my lungs at 3:00am.

OH my god...

So this whole event probably only lasted about twenty minutes in its entirety, but it seriously felt like it was going to go on forever. It felt like this moment that was separate from time, in which everything was ending and I had to watch.

It was like, from a logical point of view...okay...so the lightning is on our block at this point. From here, it's either gonna get closer...as in my apartment will be hit by lightning, or it's gonna go farther away...and it's only been doing one of those things consistently, so...it's looking like my death is imminent.

It was honestly like the apocalypse. The sky was just being ripped open and the rain and the light, and ugh...god. I mean obviously it was beautiful, had I been able to see it fully...and had I also had the knowledge that I was going to survive it, hahaha...

The worst was over and Allyson and I retreated to our rooms again, and I'm like immediately checking the New York Times website...like...what? There's gonna be a front page news story about a storm in Queens? And of course there's nothing there but I'm like, "this is important! I don't want to be the only one who experienced this!" so I check weather.com and find the following gem:

Issued by The National Weather Service

New York City, NY
2:51 am EDT, Tue., Jun. 9, 2009

... STRONG THUNDERSTORMS WILL IMPACT BERGEN... BRONX... ESSEX... HUDSON... KINGS (BROOKLYN)... NASSAU... NEW YORK (MANHATTAN)... PASSAIC... QUEENS... RICHMOND (STATEN ISLAND)... SOUTHERN WESTCHESTER... UNION AND WESTERN SUFFOLK COUNTIES...

AT 247 AM EDT... NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING AN AREA OF HEAVY SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM NEW ROCHELLE TO RED BANK... MOVING SOUTHEAST AT 25 MPH.

INTENSE CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING IS EXPECTED WITH THESE STORMS. IN ADDITION... VERY HEAVY RAIN... WITH RAINFALL RATES OF UP TO ONE AND A HALF INCHES AN HOUR... IS OCCURRING WITH THESE STORMS. THESE RAINFALL RATES WILL CAUSE MINOR FLOODING OF POOR DRAINAGE AND LOW LYING AREAS... WITH WIDESPREAD PONDING OF WATER ON ROADWAYS.

LIGHTNING IS ONE OF NATURES NUMBER ONE KILLERS. REMEMBER... IF YOU CAN HEAR THUNDER... YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO BE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. MOVE TO SAFE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.

Don't know if you caught the issue time on that weather warning...yeah...2:51am. Oh good! So when I'm doing my annual 3:00am perusal of the weather circuits, I'll come across it WHILE IT'S ALREADY GOING ON and my charred and sizzling corpse will have plenty of time to prepare itself for the afterlife. Thank you weather service -- and thank you also for the ALL CAPS. Color me reassured.

And finally, thank you for that touching passage about lightning being a killer. It was really at the forefront of my mind as I was desperately squeezing my ass cheeks together to keep from shitting my pants all over my subletted living room and my subletted roommate.

There will be no more sleep tonight.