The first time I got struck by lightning was on a beach in St. Petersburg, Florida. I was sixteen and had just spent a few uneventful minutes snorkeling in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a pale blue afternoon when I entered the water, but by the time I resurfaced, cement-like clouds had coalesced over the emptying shoreline. My parents had already found refuge in a nearby gazebo and were waving me toward them. One second later, it felt as if every square inch of my skin was being pulled upward. Then a deafening crack. My flippers melted to my feet. The silver fillings evaporated out of my teeth. My ears rung for two days.
In the twenty-three years since I have been hit four other times. Prior to the last occurrence, I noticed a squall line suspended out east. From inside the hardware store I could see my car parked at the far end of the lot, and, despite my fear, pushed myself outside with the pretense that if I just ran really fast I’d make it. I buttoned up my jacket and stepped out. But the moment my foot hit the asphalt, the storm, I swear, began to move, advancing over the highway right in my direction. It grumbled deeply, tumbling over itself to catch up to me. Cold breaths of air whispered all around as raindrops tapped my shoulders. Halfway to safety I felt the now familiar caress of gathering ions. This time the discharge lit my hair on fire.
It's always been an embarrassing affliction this inadvertent electrical trick of mine. Not even my girlfriend knew about it. I met Audrey a few months after the hair-igniting incident on a kind of day that would hint at our future relationship: serene and temperate without any trace of looming tempestuousness. Dusk was our favorite time. We loved watching the sun as it set behind the city skyline. And although my wariness of swirling and darkening cumulonimbus formations sometimes drove us indoors, she seemed to find it a tolerable, if not an endearing, trait. It was actually on a stone bridge stained orange-pink by the retreating light of the day that I proposed to Audrey. Ours was definitely not a stormy relationship which is why it came as such a shock when she broke off our engagement.
So today is the last day I'll see her. She has uprooted all of her possessions and put them in boxes by the door, ready to stuff in a truck and plant in another apartment on the other side of the country. I ask her if she wants to sit on the balcony and watch the sunset with me, not in a romantic way of course because the spark between us is gone. She agrees. The daylight is sparse, the red beams barely break through since the whole of the sky is filled with a billowing charcoal mass of heavy clouds flashing with intermittent bursts of blue luminescence.
"Looks like there's a thunderstorm headed our way," she says. "Do you want to go inside?"
"No, I'm okay," I tell her. I hold her close, closer than ever. "Let's stay here a little while longer."