It’s been almost a year since the rumble of Irma’s clouds chased us all the way back to West Coast — as it was the only flight left as the projected Cat. 5 barreled toward our Tampa Bay. Just days before she courted our waters, our ever-inprogress-home crumbled. 

Our ceiling had fallen. Yes, the sky had actually fallen. Just narrowly missing myself, and our fur child. When I say fell, I don’t mean in the way Chicken Little would ramble on about. 

I mean plummeted. What we thought was going to be a patchable hole, turned into our ceiling (from the front door, to the living room, and the start of the kitchen) incinerating itself from existence. 

The drywall and cotton-candy-colored insulations,  smashed with a thud. I looked up to see Trevor’s foot hanging through the wall like a bad Nickelodeon cartoon.

All I saw was a defeated foot, retreat into the ceiling.

He bought our home just a few months before we met, and it’s been our work in progress since our story began in August of 2015.

We didn’t realize it then, but something had just rattled our little home. Not a house… a home. A home he and his family gutted, and remodeled, in hopes of this being a nest egg. Little did we know it would become our nest to grow within. A foundation for a life neither one of us thought we would ever have. 

In a lot of ways, this home has evolved with us. Through every stage of our relationship it has earned a proverbial brownie patch.

During my first visit from California, we braved IKEA the day after I spoke those three terrifying little words for the first time. Then the appliances arrived on my second trip. Prior to that we savored romantic dates on the kitchen floor eating pizza from the box and sipping beer while sharing our inner most thoughts.

In the beginning, there wasn’t much. It was brand new. The walls were bare, the living room was empty, and the bedroom was nothing more than a cozy mattress on the floor.  

Side by side with our home we grew. We learned how to put ourselves back together again–as individuals and as a unit. Together building a foundation of safety, warmth, and stability, neither of us thought was possible.

When I looked at the crumbling mess in our doorway, my heart couldn’t help but swell with equal parts exasperation, and relief, that he was okay.

Relationships are homes for the heart. Like a remodel it takes time, patience, dedication, consistency, and hell of a lot of love.

The kind of love that savors the process of being an eternal work in progress. 

The hole in the ceiling proved to be a leak from a hardworking air conditioner past her prime, that sopped through half our house. We wound up on an air mattress in his mom’s living room. Everyday, Trevor and his mom were up in the 120 degree attic working on the repairs.

Our phones were abuzz with the incoming storm. It was my first hurricane. As a Californian, you’re eternally on high alert for what might one day be the illusive “Big One.” I had never experienced true time-stopping storm preparation.

My heart stopped and time froze as the reality of what a category 5 storm could mean for our beloved peninsula. We could lose everything. Not just our possessions… but the one thing that was truly ours. Our home that we’d built, the lawn that we’d laid our selves, every brownie badge — gone.

Finally we both had to call home. A place that we didn’t want to run from — a life I was proud to live. 

The anxiety was loud, determined, and ruthless. I thought I had a decent grasp on it, but no matter how tightly bound their collars, they found a way to break free.

Trevor had just picked up meditation, and insisted that it would cure — what I believed to be — the incurable. There was a time when I could feel his fatigue of their presence and persistence. To the point where there I was given a choice: eternal darkness, or the slightest glimmer of light. 

I called my best friend. We had been in contact more in that week than we had since the move. She’s been there through all of my storms, including the ones I would much rather not relive. Our love is that of blood sisters, and our list of battles fought side by side is longer than I care to count. 

A text comes through, “Have you heard the song Thunder by Imagine Dragons? It’s your Hurricane song…olive juice,  J.” 

I hadn’t heard it — but it felt safe.

Something about the raw authenticity and ruthless rumble of the drum, sent the darkness away. A song, by a band I had never really known, showed me that I had that power to deny darkness access to my life. I could pierce the clouds and find the ground once again.

Like many others, we evacuated. Packing up valuables, filling up gallons of gas, and saying goodbye to a home we thought we’d never come home to.

I drove us overnight to Jacksonville, where Trevor, his mom, our dog and I slept in a parking lot in my Toyota Corolla. Sleep couldn’t found me. I had never been more awake.

Focus, familial love, and fearlessness, froze the darkness in its tracks, illuminated only by a flickering streetlight in early dawn. It was like looking at my demons through bulletproof glass.

For the first time, I was impenetrable.

It was 3 am — in the middle of the JAX cell phone lot — and Kira needed to pee. The sky a deep blue. It was eerily, yet peacefuly, silent. No honking, thunder, wind or whining, just silence. It was serene. 

In that early morning moment, I was reminded of what mattered.

It wasn’t my fears, inhibitions, nor my possessions. It wasn’t the moments where I felt my own foundation crumbling. It wasn’t the tumbling of false truths.

The only thing that mattered was the home we’d built within ourselves, and one another.

When I started packing, I just threw a bunch of clean clothes in a bag and went. None of it mattered other than the man I love and the unbreakable life we’ve fostered. 

Throughout the Hurricane — and moving back into our home — I would occasionally play “Thunder” to remind myself of battles we’d fought during Irma’s short reign.

A reminder that no matter how intimidating the rumble of the storm, we could whether it together.

I had never really heard to the lyrics. Not until another storm crossed rolled in. This one was intimately introspective, and subsequently, inexplicable. It was 5 a.m., and I was woken up by thunder that roared and rattled the windows. Good ol’ Florida. It awoke me before my alarm. Then a crash. My heart stopped synonymously with the strike of lightning, many mississippi seconds away.

This day was different.

Not sure why, I simply knew something had shifted within me. I took a new route to work, and a ride that was normally silent, was scored by Imagine Dragons once again. 

This time I felt every syllable as they shot through my soul. For the first time I felt my own power, like that of lightning as the predecessor of thunder.

Lightning is only seen, judged, observed. Thunder is felt. Upon strike, neutralizes electrons in the atmosphere effectively neutralizing negative charges. Thunder does what nature has intended her to do: cause a rumble.