Because Thunderstorms are Never Intense Enough

It's after 3:00pm and the storm's not here yet.  From what I can find online, it's not anywhere, and I am deeply disappointed.  I felt a bright excitement this morning when my friend put up a post that we were in for real weather, a drastic and fast moving cold front that would create lightning! and crazy winds! and Hail!.  I have spent the better part of the day trying to track the storm, but I have been hard pressed to find any evidence of its existence.   Part of me is still holding out hope for something spectacular with a darkening sky and air that turns green, gale force winds, deafening cracks of thunder and crisp bolts of lightning (with no accompanying damage, of course).  The view out the windows of this nineteenth floor office is of other office windows.  I can tell by the light that it is not a clear day, and there is a slight tint of color to the air, but it's not that threatening pre-storm darkness I want.  Didn't I read once that pre-storm air is charged with negative ions?  I seek the thrill of that intense electricity that I liken to the energy that travels between two lustful lovers.

I'm being stood up by the storm.  I put on my best dress and did up my hair special just for you, cold-front-moving-in-fast-and -thrilling.  Now I'm left standing on the corner looking bewildered and wondering if there were some miscommunication.  Maybe I got the day wrong, or the time.  Maybe I imagined the whole thing.  Yes, that must be it.  It was a dream i took for reality.

You know, that's really it, right there; my life in a nutshell.   A dream I mistook for reality.  Since I was fifteen I've had no direction.  I've had aspirations and plans, but nothing that ever felt sure, known.  Don't you, and most of the world's inhabitants, have a strong sense of heading down the right path?  Aren't you drawn by some sense of destiny, some strong inclination towards what you know in your heart you're supposed to be doing?  Don't most of us think that about each other?

I'm not sure why 'since I was fifteen'; I just remember thinking one day that I had no idea of my life after fifteen.  Not, 'I have no idea what my life will be like" after fifteen, just, 'I have no idea of a life after fifteen".

Now here I am at this advanced age on the other end of the time line and I still don't have any idea of my life, except for that one really big thing, my daughter.  But her life is her's and not a definition of mine.  Mine is still shapeless and behaving like water, taking the shape of whatever container it ends up in.

I thought it would be so much more exciting.  Or did I?  A part of me daydreamed about Cinderella gowns and truelove and an exciting life on the stage, but it was never a waking, conscientious, material thing I could grasp.  Or even had a consciousness of grasping.  Only now do I have an awareness that I can want those things in a concrete, material way.  Sure, I took steps toward the direction of where  my desires lived, but I don't think I had an eye towards trying to bushwack my way onto the actual path. 

And now, I tell myself I'm tired.  I suspect I am overwhelmed by my life.  By the seeming stagnant nature of it.  It's like a pond that is fed by a stream, but so overrun with algae that you can't see where the tributary is.  There has been some movement.  You can sense that.  But there is no real shift of the larger body of water.  The algae stays and grows, absorbing all the light, feeding on it and jamming up the pond, inhibiting further movement .

Some rumbling has started.  And the sky outside these windows is darkening.  !!! Excitement!  and thunder!! Finally.  There are free falling sheets of rain, and bolts of lightning followed by slamming claps of thunder.  The wind is shoving the rain sideways.  Now THIS is a storm!

Maybe - all I have to do is be patient.  Maybe- if I wait long enough, my own storm will roll into port and my life will be the thrilling ride it is meant to be.  I suspect, unlike a fast moving cold front, I may have to make my own storm happen.  Is that the case?  Or do our lives unfold according to some unknown plan, some destiny.  Can I? just wait for my own storm to roll in?  I guess we'll all just have to wait and see.