The night continues to give me away. I spent the better part of the past few days purposefully locked in my own space and time, even as I tried desperately to escape the sadness. I am not sad. I am not sad. If I say it three times, it has to come true like Dorothy and her red shoes. How do you find your home when you don’t even know where you are? I had been running on sleepless nights and rainy days that I barely noticed anymore because of the way the house felt like a cave, when the thought occurred to me that I had forgotten you were a hurricane. How it’s impossible to escape one that surrounds you. They will never tell you this, but to me there is a calming peace when you face one head on. It’s as if, in the inevitability of its destruction, you somehow know you will be able to either survive or rebuild it all. Life can always be endured, rebuilt, reconstructed, forgiven. Or at least, thats how I’ve always felt. Put a raincoat on and let the water fall off you as you soak, then let the aftermath of the flood be the bath that cleanses all your sins. Yet sometimes, when I feel as if I have finally survived it all, the winds knock me back into my grave and I am left for dead. A reminder that I am only in the eerie calm of the eye. I cannot escape it. I spent the past month exploring my roots while I was down under there. I thought about zombies and how people can really come back from the dead even when the world around them is still dead inside. How maybe we’re all just vampires who need light in order to survive. Or is it die? I was trying to remember what home felt like when I remembered it was people, not places. Please, please let me be your home, I had said, then I proceeded to light my walls on fire. I was sifting through the ashes I left on your floor and through the bridges that had burned down when he told me that you had to let those fires light the way, not try to put them out. Yet all I feel and see is darkness, rain, wind and smoke. Maybe he meant that you could build something new, something stronger, with more windows to let the light in. Then I could at least see a way out of this mess I’ve laid myself in six feet under. I could find my way back home. But I am not yet dead in the eye of the storm. I am not sad.