The First Drop of Rain in a Storm
A story about childhood trauma
I grew up afraid of storms.
It wasn’t the kind of reaction I could control, unfortunately.
A lot of the time when it rained, I was hiding away under the dining room table, or under my bed, or inside a closet.
You may say I’m exaggerating, but you can ask anyone in my family.
I’ve dreaded summer because of storms.
I would be obsessed with the weather report because I needed to know what would happen the next day.
I knew everything about how the climate worked and the way nature would move around me to create that symphony of thunder and rain.
Yet, not just once did I cry during thunderstorms, with tears streaking down my cheeks while it rained outside, the wind howling and hitting the walls of my home.
I was always scared that the world would end, or something, but I still held on.
It’s funny how that came to be: my mother tells me it was a nurse in the hospital where I was born, carrying a metal basin for my bath. She dropped it in the hallway, and, supposedly, the sound echoed throughout the hospital. Maybe other babies developed the same fear I did, and now they are out there feeling these traumas on their…
