Hurricane Melissa Quotes

feels so damn good?

The doldrums. A fate worse than a summer hurricane any sailor would tell you. At least a storm is something you can dance with, something you can fight. In the doldrums there is nothing to be done but float and wait.

There are worse things. Floods, hurricanes, Republicans.

Later, this understanding evolved into a fear of my own susceptibility to madness, but as a child I simply understood that a person could not live with an open channel to the sublime inside them; it was impossible to hold on to the collective story of human life with that live cord writhing through you, showering sparks like a downed wire in a hurricane. Human life was defined by composure and linearity, school bus routes and homework and gender and bedtimes and taxes. Though I could meet its requirements most of the time, I knew my adherence to the logic of reality was tenuous, that a more feral sensibility reigned beneath it.

So, five years ago, when a hurricane had loomed out of the Atlantic like a great dark wall, its storm-force winds pushing twenty- and thirty-foot waves before it like a child’s hand splashing drops across a pond, there was a part of Alex that hoped the storm would sweep away the entire island and cleanse it of its terrible deeds.