By the time I finished my previous post, I had drunk half of a Four Loko Gold and smoked a modest amount of weed, and soon after dived promptly into bed. Sometime early in the morning, I awoke and realized my house was without power. This was expected, so I rolled over and fell back asleep. I woke again sometime later to several flash flood warnings for my area on my cell phone (which I ignored as it was already too late to safely drive in my car) and decided to check the sandbags I had placed at the foot of my front door.
“Oh”.
That was all I could think as I stared out into the grimy ocean that was swallowing up my street, the turbid waters gnawed at the top of the little heap of sandbags, spilled over onto my feet with every gust of cold air from the storming winds. Taking the car was a risk before but was now certainly useless. No starting it without the engine flooding, so driving was out of the question. I shut the door and paced around for a brief, uncertain period of time between my home office and living room.
“Well, maybe that’s the worst of it. It just can’t rain that much, right?”
But rain it did. It wasn’t much longer before I noticed the water spilling in from under the doorjamb. If the water kept rising, it would flood the whole house. All I could manage to do was scramble to stuff towels uselessly at the base of the door, a futile effort, but it was something that I could believe in for a short time. After all, at least I was trying to save my home. I passed the kitchen and stepped down into my bedroom, where I noticed the carpet was wet immediately. What I failed to take into account was that the laundry room and bedroom used to be a carport and sat lower than the rest of the house. By the time I had seen water beginning to breach the front door, water had already begun pouring into the laundry room from the back door and the carpet in the bedroom was just sucking it up. Game over. The house was fucked with or without me, so I trudged through the bedroom into the flooding laundry room and out the back door, made my way quickly around the side of the house and went promptly to my lifelong friend Jesse’s house next door, where I would weather the remainder of the storm in a daze.
Hours after Hurricane Ian had subsided, I woke up in Jesse’s living room and decided to survey the damage to my house. The flooding was significant. I sloshed through the house once, and left, wandering the streets in disbelief and sadness. My family’s home and a great deal of our belongings were ruined and sat in a heap outside by the mailbox for the last several weeks until a large truck with a mechanical claw came and gobbled it all up, scraping the last remains of our “normal” life off of the grass like so many cheap claw-machine prizes. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as were waiting on the FEMA adjuster to come in the driveway when the truck came through. My wife cried.
Life is hard. The older I get, the less certain I am about what I’m doing. Events like this rattle one’s confidence. I don’t know what else to say presently, but I don’t think we’ll stay here much longer. Maybe it’s a sign, or just bad luck. I’m still trying to process it all.
I just want to go home.
Towers of Rust 