The unforgiving north wind whips through the forest behind a blue house in a cul de sac not far from the lake, causing the house to creak and groan as it shields the residents inside from less-than-ideal weather conditions.
A faint light glows from the back window on the house’s far side, cascading waves of flickering gold onto the fresh snowfall.
It doesn’t make sense why there would be a light on in the house because everyone seems to be asleep.
Well, everyone but the eldest daughter.
The light from the window is coming from a book light brighter than any book light should be. She brought the small clip light from her home in Asheville, North Carolina. She figured she would need it for the 15-plus paperbacks she packed in her suitcase.
Typically, the daughter doesn’t live in the back room of her parent’s home. She moved out over two years ago in favor of her education in the mountains.
The room, previously her father’s “man cave,” was converted into something of a place one could reside after she arrived in Michigan in late September. The life she was so proud to build for herself was dismantled by something entirely out of her control for the umpteenth time this calendar year.
She seems comfortable enough even as she isn’t using the book light for its intended purpose. The serpentine-like cord of the light bends up, illuminating the ceiling rather than a page, allowing for a softer luminescence than the small bedside lamp would allow.
She is laughing. She must’ve just read something funny on the digital page she flipped to on her tablet.
The room is frigid, and a little heater buzzes from its plug on the wall. For some reason, the furnace’s heat rarely reaches this corner of the house, so she makes do with a pocket-sized version.
The daughter spends days and nights huddling under a blanket that isn’t hers and pillows she did not choose while the temperature steadily hovers in the high 50s.
Tonight is extra cold, 24 degrees, to be exact.
She laughs again, and complete darkness swallows her up. In the blink of an eye, the glow of the light on the ceiling transfers to a dimmer one, illuminating her tired face, the whirring of the heater silenced with the blackness.
Just beyond her door, she hears a single chirp from the smoke detector.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
*
“I get those flash flood warnings all the time. I get the… you know. We will get a lot of rain, and in Ohio, we used to get the tornado ones all the time. I’ve never been scared of the weather. I’ve never been a person like, “Ugh, thunder, lightning, I’m scared. Blah Blah Blah,” Kiersten said, her voice crackling over the shoddy Google Meet connection.
“Well, we weren’t. I was talking to my cousin on the frickin’ phone and we, again, were watching Channing Tatum Step Up videos and we were mad the power went out because fucking Channing Tatum turned off,” I reply, ending the sentence with a giggle over the bizarreness of it all.
I continue on the verge of breathlessness due to the fast-paced nature of our conversation, “I had no idea, like when I was a kid I kind of liked power outages. Like power outages were fun like… We are gonna have candles. We are gonna like, eat pizza or something, but also it was mainly from snow storms.”
“Yeah, I mean, everything I’ve endured has been like a two-daytwo-day max situation. I’ve also been with my family, and I’ve been… not completely on my own. I think it’s a completely different experience not being surrounded by people who have it in their hands. Like when I,” Kiersten continues, her words cutting out briefly.
I recline back in the rickety desk chair, watching her mouth move slowly, then not at all.
The audio starts again, her words catching up to the visual of her lips moving on the screen like a ghost pressing the fast-forward button, “It’s fine. They are going to figure it out. It’s not on me to problem solve right now. That situation. It was fully on me to problem solve and prepare and I was so mad at myself because I did not prepare.”
I cut in, “but, there’s no way we could have.”
She agrees, and I stop talking, “But that’s what I mean. It was a completely different experience to have to problem-solve myself. Like, not just put it on my mom and dad and say, “Oh, you guys have to figure it out, like the powers out…”
I interrupt her again, adding, “I mean I’m just like… I think the reason I was so calm through a lot of it… was… I was like, “This is out of my control. So, I’m just gonna roll with the punches.” When I started getting really irritated was when I realized it was within my control to do something about it and I realized what we needed to do.”
She makes an affirmative noise while I continue to speak.
“Like, when we were at the public library downtown and I was hearing there was a way out and we were not.” I laugh incredulously. “We were not doing it quickly. I was like why are we not doing this?”
“Yeah, it was,” She takes a forceful breath and says while laughing between words. “I can’t. I actually can’t.”
Her hand glitches as she runs her fingers through blonde hair, “It’s been so long since I’ve been there. I almost separated myself from it. Now, I’m like, “Oh, we did experience that.”
I butt in at the end of her sentence, “You know what’s interesting though? When we were going through it, it almost seemed like so many more days had passed before we evacuated.”
“I know,” she agrees.
Watching Kiersten shake her head on the screen, I continue, “Thursday we were hanging out. Thursday night we were drinking and stuff. Then, the storm hit Friday morning and we were doing all this stuff Friday. We didn’t even realize until Friday night when we saw the cop and we left Saturday night after we were on our phones all day because we had found the library.”
*
My dreams falter while a dim blue light streams through the blinds I left open to accommodate the ajar window. The apartment is already sweltering, sticking my clothes from the night before to my skin unpleasantly.
A faint headache blooms behind my eyes. I didn’t take out my contacts and maybe drank a smidge too much Stella Rosa Black last night.
A forceful wind rushes through the room, forcing the doors and cabinets to rattle in the vacuum. At the same time, a loud beeping permeates the last connection I have to my dream-addled mind.
As soon as I laid my head on the pillow last night after the power went out around 3:20 a.m., this incessant beeping from the security system started.
I remember ignoring Kiersten and Sydney, the friends whose couch I was currently crashing on, trying to figure out how to turn it off. The little box would let out a long, unhappy bleat with every button they pressed. I figured it was a problem for the next day. I pretended to sleep, letting them handle it because my affinity for smashing it with a hammer would probably not be appreciated.
I turned over my mostly dead phone. The battery drained from playing brown noise on Spotify all night. My grandma always said even as a child, I slept like The Princess and The Pea.
The clock reads 7:23 a.m.
I roll off the couch, ignoring the beeps from the kitchen. My hair dances with the breeze blowing through the living room, and I sit on the ground behind the loveseat in front of the window.
The service is spotty, but I have a few bars, so I pull up Instagram to record the storm raging outside for my story. I am addicted to social media.
The trees outside sway like reeds. With each passing minute, I hear a loud crack of wood splintering and watch another member of the forest fall prey to the sheets of rain battering Appalachia.
I think about Hurricane Florence, which I endured during my senior year of high school, and remind myself that I’ve done this before. It’s just another storm.
I stay by the window for a while and scour the internet for a way to turn the alarm off, unable to ignore it for much longer.
It is not my first time staying at my friends’ apartment, so I know they won’t be awake for a few more hours. After finding a cure for the little box, I crawl back into the nest I made in the couch cushions and fall back asleep, hoping to wake up to the lights on and A/C blasting once more.
*
Animal Crossing characters waddle across the screen, having a tree decorating party as faint Christmas music plays on the TV in my temporary bedroom.
My laptop is so slow, already breathing heavily where it sits on my lap. I wait a few moments, tapping my nails on the edge of the keyboard, and hear the tell-tale sign of the Google Meet doorbell letting me know someone joined my meeting. I allow the person waiting in the lobby to join and hear the loud whoosh of a car driving down the road.
My childhood friend, Alexa, an elementary school teacher, pops onto the screen at last, greeting me with a “Hello.”
I reply with my signature, “Hi, friend.” with a drawn-out “e” sound.
Behind Alexa and her fiance Joel, who is driving the car, is the unmistakable scene of Anchorage, Alaska, zipping by.
A few weeks ago, Alexa mentioned in passing over one of our regular Marco Polo chats what she was doing during the hurricane after I gave her the rundown of what I was going through.
So, I set up this meeting a few days ago to ask her more about what she was talking about.
“You said during Helene you were already teaching a storm unit in your classroom,” I ask after we exchanged our initial pleasantries and worked out technical issues, one of the many joys of having friends who live thousands of miles away.
Alexa affirms my question, saying, “Yeah, just without even planning it, my reading curriculum was going through stuff that had to do with natural disasters. Simultaneously, while I was going through this unit, Hurricane Helene hit, and it was the perfect applicable real-world event that was happening as I was teaching this unit.”
“So, what kind of stuff did you guys do if you remember,” I wonder out loud.
“I showed videos. I showed pictures and interviews with people in places that were affected down south. I was able to show them what was going on at the time from a real news channel,” she said while looking through the windshield.
While waiting for her to finish, I trace my finger over the keys on my laptop and ask her if her students ever saw a natural disaster like a hurricane before.
“In Anchorage we experience earthquakes, so a lot of them have lived through minor earthquakes. Some of them remembered back in 2019 there was… I think it was a magnitude seven…” she says.
A gust of air releases a “Wow” from my lips as I listen to her tell me how the large earthquake destroyed parts of the city, adding, “It’s interesting, especially for Alaskan kids because they are so far removed from the continental United States, and for them to relate to what is going on in the lower 48. For them to see the videos and for me to be like, “Hey, I actually have a friend who had to move away from this stuff,” made the event more real.”
Following her anecdote, I ask if she has ever experienced a big weather event.
“Not specifically one that has affected me…” she trails off.
I hear something akin to a Charlie Brown parent rumbling in the background. Still, I can’t make out what the voice is saying as she starts again, “Okay, I guess if you consider blizzards, kind of. Like, I have been a part of big snow dumpings, but nothing that has affected me monumentally.”
“So, being someone who was on the outside of the storm, not going through it. What was your perspective coming from the outside? I mean you knew I was someone going through the storm, but I’ve gone through hurricanes before. I mean the news changed very quickly after the storm so, was it something you forgot about,” I ask, my brow furrowing.
Alexa thinks for a moment, then starts speaking, “I feel like the first few weeks it was something that was on the forefront of my mind. There were people on Instagram sharing links to donate and to send people out to help. My grandparents were in Florida and had to evacuate to another part of the state. It was something I was thinking about consistently, but in the last few months … Being so far away, it’s hard to still think about it as much as I was at the very beginning, which is kind of sad.”
I hear more rumbling from the driver’s side of the car, and Alexa turns her phone to Joel, the video fracturing at the movement.
“We had a friend who…” Joel adds as the audio cuts out.
After a second, I hear him again, continuing with his sentence, “…Louisville but he was in Georgia and he had to leave early because he planned for Friday. He left early because they said the roads were going to be flooded. Now, the roads he drove on up to Kentucky from Georgia, are gone.”
*
“Oh, what’s on the bar there,” I say as my Grandma Marcia and I push through the glass double doors into Randy’s, a small-town family restaurant in Prudenville, Michigan. “Friday fish fry?”
My grandma corrects me, saying no and that it is a Saturday. I gasp and whisper, “The prime rib buffet.”
I haven’t tried the prime rib buffet yet since I’ve been living with my parents again. My dad never ceases to remind me of its existence basically every time I visit their new house, but we never seem to go to Randy’s when it’s available.
A blonde waitress greets us as we enter, sounding like a herd of horses stomping the snow off our boots. The long room is decorated with garland, a Christmas tree, and an odd number of TVs, given we are not in a bar, the most common type of food joint in rural Michigan.
“How are you two doin’ tonight,” the server asks as we make our way toward a booth butted up to the back wall of the buffet room.
Grandma and I affirm we are both doing well, even though we still haven’t recovered from the frigid air. We order our drinks and let the server know we are getting the buffet. Without sitting down, we shrug off our coats and load our plates, silverware clinking around us.
“I have never seen wilt-y lettuce on there and there’s like a bunch of it. I showed the guy because I mean I’ve just never ever seen that. It’s been like pristine…”
I interrupt my grandma, asking her what he said.
“He said he would take care of it,” she explains while separating the fresh leaves from the wilted ones on her plate, her mouth pressing in a firm line.
To lighten the mood, I take a massive bite of fried chicken and joke, “I don’t know who Randy is, but he can make some chicken.”
She laughs and says, ”So, what is this about?”
“I just want to talk about Helene a little bit,” I reply, my knife clinking loudly as I put my chicken bones onto my half-empty plate. “Oh, shit. I’m not done with that yet I don’t know why I put the bones on there… Um, and like how you were feelin’ throughout the whole thing. I mean I know it’s tough to have someone going through something and having you not be able to contact them.”
I pause and look up from the piece of prime rib half eaten on my plate. My grandma sniffs and blots her eyes.
I continue, “I don’t know what you guys were thinkin’, ya know?”
Watching her cry brings back how I felt during the storm. Helplessly, I continued to call my family, hearing the failed dial tone every single time. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I remember feeling like an island for the first time since moving from the coast two years ago.
She speaks again, her voice breaking my train of thought.
“I cried for the whole day,” she wheezes softly, her sentence petering off partway through.
A loud talker from another table mentioning the snow melting this weekend permeates our conversation, popping the heavy bubble of emotion built around us the last few minutes.
She wipes her nose with her napkin and finally looks up at me, though her eyes are unfocused, “Yeah, it was pretty awful,” punctuating the sentence with a few sniffles. “Yep, I was home alone. Just cryin’ all day.”
Her voice clears up, saying, “Nobody told me if they heard from you or anything like that… well. There was one time I talked to your dad or something.”
“They didn’t know. Nobody knew,” I take a sip of my water which started to sweat all over the table. “I didn’t know.”
“How bad it was,” she asks.
“No, not until I was out.”
*
“Like, I literally was just at White Duck Taco like a week before the hurricane hit.” Kiersten says.
Building off of her sentence, I reply, “No, literally. I was… I remember I was hanging out with some of the people from The Blue Banner and I was going to go out with some friends after that because my friend was…”
I stop talking and make an “oof” sound like someone punched me in the gut.
The video connection froze again, and the meeting ended, “Oh no, Kiersten left the meeting.”
Referencing my Twilight obsession, I urge, “Come back, loca,” as my laptop starts to ring with a Facetime call.
I laugh nervously, waiting for our new call to connect, “What happened, girl.”
Kiersten replies with her eyes full of shock, and she laughs, her hand covering her mouth, “Laptop died, girl.”
Picking up where I left off, I say, “Yeah, what I was saying was… I was hanging out with some of The Blue Banner people and I went to The Getaway that night. It was a week before the hurricane. It was for my friend’s birthday show in September. I almost didn’t go to The Getaway that night. Like, “I’ll be able to go next time.” It was just taking for granted the things I had in front of me the whole time I had been living in Asheville and it just washed away.”
“So, that’s one of the biggest things for me. I’m constantly stuck in like a,” she pauses, reordering her thoughts.
“I’m so glad I was able to get out,” she said, her face falling.
“I’m really kind of dreading January, going back, but I’m also still in a spot where I want to go back and be grateful for what is still there. I’m ready to go back to make different memories and see the people. I’m about to graduate. So, half of a year of being there is gone. I… m… getting… masters and I want to do it in a… where I can get…” Kiersten says, her voice fracturing into bits and pieces, and then nothing at all.
“Oh, no you’re frozen,” I say, feeling defeated.
*
“These past few days we’ve been filming at this cabin in the woods. It’s dark as fuck out there,” Sydney swears, her skin glowing from the light of her laptop.
“There’s no street lights. There is service, but it’s spotty, and so, like, that is a little freaky,” she continues while looking off-screen somewhere in her bedroom, “It kind of reminds me of it. It reminds me of that feeling. I have to put on music that makes me feel something else, so I don’t focus on how dark it is outside.”
“Yeah,” I reply, listening to her tell me about her internship in Nashville, Tennessee.
“… and like I don’t know. I think any time I’m not able to get a hold of somebody now, like if my messages don’t deliver or something like that,” she adds, pausing to think.
Taking hold of the suspended moment, I ask rhetorically, “You’re like what happened? Where did they go?”
“Yeah,” she agrees, stuttering. “I.. I.. and like… before I didn’t really like driving in places with not a lot of light, but even more so now. I hate it. Especially in places that should have light and don’t. Like what is going on. When you were telling us about the power outages you have been having,”
I cut in at the end of her thought, shaking my head, my bun flopping with the movement, “Two of ‘em.”
“I was trying to imagine how I would even feel if that happened to me, and I think I would freak the fuck out. I think about what would happen if we go back to school. Thank freaking goodness hurricane season is over because I could not fucking deal with that,” she says, incredulity seeping from her words.
“I don’t know. Me and Kiersten’s apartment has lost power before because of wind or a thunderstorm. So, I’m nervous for that to happen again and see how we deal with it,” She pauses, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I can’t really imagine it, and I’m scared for it to happen. I guess I think it will be hard to put a spin on things because the last time we were in that apartment was at that moment.”
The conversation drops off, both of us sitting in silence, and I say, “It was your guys’ sanctuary and your safe space, but the last time you were there. Now, it’s been almost tainted a little bit. I mean, Kiersten said when she went back to go get her stuff, she was like, “I need to be in and out. I don’t want to be here. The vibe is not what I created for myself.”
Sydney waits, thinking of a response, “I feel like we will have to do something to remake it.”
*
Clouds hang heavy overhead as the humid air snakes its way through the crowd gathered outside Downtown Asheville’s public library.
My heart thuds in my ears as I lean over the railing, looking down into the courtyard. I take my black Croc and toe a trampled leaf, the crispy deadness of it dissolving under my shoe as I grind it into the cement. Pieces of the brown paper-like debris float off the sidewalk’s edge, fluttering to the trees below.
Around me, a cacophony of voices and warm bodies writhe, the smell of sweat and desperation strong in my nostrils.
While driving around last night, assessing the damage to our beautiful city, we drove toward downtown, hoping to get a wifi signal somewhere because somehow the buildings could still emit light.
Typically, I don’t hang around the Grove Arcade, but in the dark, a few people gathered by the library doors, all on their phones. Since it was night, I didn’t want to check it out, so we waited until this morning to return.
The word got out fast. Once we arrived, dozens of people crowded by the entrance of the building I have never been inside, on their phones.
Now, standing in the large gathering are tourists, students and an eclectic group of Ashevillians, all sharing the minuscule waves of wifi leaking from the building. To my right, Sydney and Kiersten crouch on the ground, talking to their families with one finger in their left ear and phones clutched in their right hands.
I already spoke to my mom earlier, but there isn’t much she can do from 800 miles away, and since Kiersten’s phone isn’t working, I let her borrow mine, even though it is almost dead.
Aside from the crowd, for the last few hours, it’s been me and the leaves, crunching one after another, trying to separate myself from the overwhelming crescendo of voices around me.
Usually, I do well in crowds, but my hair is greasy, and I’m not wearing a bra under my T-shirt. I feel very unkempt.
My social battery ran out of juice hours ago. Typically, I thrive off the energy of the people around me and, more often than not, enjoy large crowds like the ones I was a part of this summer at Lollapalooza. This is nothing akin to the high energy of a music festival, though. This is a different type of vibe; a darker, sadder layer of mist hangs over everyone’s heads rather than the excitement of a festival fog machine.
Less than 20 minutes ago, Sydney turned to me and said, Chrissie, the chapter president of our sorority, got out of Asheville and was able to make it to Raleigh.
With each passing minute, the temperature of my blood rises a degree, slowly encroaching on a boil.
We can finally do something, and we are still here. I don’t understand.
I’ve been calm over the past 24 hours, but now my sanity is unfurling minute by minute. I’ve held it together long enough. I’ve watched everyone break down around me, and I’ve hit my wall.
I’m ready to break free of this frozen purgatory.
I tell Kiersten I need to step away and push my way through the crowd, muttering impatient “excuse mes” with each person standing in my way.
I could tell I was starting to break when a girl showed me a picture of Tunnel Road underwater earlier. I went off on her about how AI is wrecking society and asked why she would show me misinformation at a time like this?
It was a fake photo, wasn’t it?
I burst through the crown, tears threatening to spill over but not falling. I’ve made it this far. I can’t give in now.
Sitting on a bench underneath a small tree, I stare into Malaprop’s, a bookstore I’ve been meaning to go to but haven’t yet. The colorful spines stare back at me, and I think about how I would do anything to live in one of the stories I’ve read instead of living through this.
After sitting on the bench for a while, I elbow my way back into the throng of people to my friends still huddling on the ground and say, “I’m leaving tonight.”
*
I adjust my pillows and lay on the bed, holding my laptop so it doesn’t slide onto the floor as I hear Sydney say, “Me and Kiersten were in the car. We were waiting for gas or on the way to the gas station. Kiersten starts getting really emotional. At that point, I already had my mental breakdown, So I was thinking, “What good is crying going to do me now?”
Her determined expression cuts me like a knife, “It’s time to figure this shit out. It’s time to make a fucking plan.”
I laugh while she explains her and Kiersten’s ride to the gas station late Friday night and adds, “It’s time to lock in.”
“…but Kiersten hadn’t totally had her emotional moment yet. She was getting very worked up. I was like, “What’s wrong. What are you worried about?” She told me what you would assume,” Sydney pauses, looking around contemplatively, then starts again. “I said to her, “You can’t do this. If you start crying. If you can’t hold it together, I won’t be able to hold it together. I need you to hold it together for me.” and she said to me, “That’s not fair.”
She pauses again, gathering her thoughts and continues, “I said to her, “I know that’s not fair” and you know, “I’m going to let you have your moment. I’m going to let you cry this one out. Right here, right now, but after that, we have to be brave.” I don’t remember exactly what I said but it was something like, “We have to be strong for each other. We have to fuckin’ deal with this.” She had her moment, I let her cry it out and we got back to work.”
I fold my pillow in half, remembering my own drive to the Merrimon Avenue gas station on the Friday of the storm. It was the only time the three of us were apart, from Thursday morning to the following Monday when I flew out of Charlotte to my parent’s house in Michigan.
Sydney drove her car to the gas station with Kiersten, following close behind me to avoid being separated. I drove slowly, watching their every turn, but even as we were only a few car lengths apart, I listened to music tamping my emotions down while they were on the edge of an emotional precipice.
“When you were talking about your dad coming to get us too, I’m going to be honest, I was like, I feel like a sitting duck,” I said, thinking about the limbo I felt on Saturday at the public library.
“I felt like I wanted to do something, and waiting was the worst possible thing I could have done, you know? You guys saw that in me on Saturday, too. I was like. I gotta fuckin’ go. I gotta fuckin’ go,” I say, laughing.
Laughing through the harsh memories from the few days following the hurricane is the only way I can continue to talk about it.
Sydney giggles along with me, saying with a melancholy grin, “There is nothing I can compare it to in my life. I’ve never felt that feeling and I hope I never have to feel it again because it truly was the worst. It really tested me. I mean thank God I was with you guys. If I was with anybody else I wasn’t close to, I don’t know what it would have brought out of me.”
We laugh again, the uncanny mirth of her last sentence permeating the air, stretching the 600 miles between us.
“Yeah, not trusting the people you are around, too. If you would have just been with some random friends you had met or whatever,” I pause, more seriously than a few moments before. “You wouldn’t know if they would have your back in that situation.”
“It’s also like … you guys are my comfort people,” Sydney says, her admission laying heavily on my chest. “Kiersten? She knows how I get in those situations. She can feel my emotions and having her there was so good. I mean, it was hard because she was also taking care of herself, but having her there, having you there, it comforted me in a way that … I couldn’t. You know … I couldn’t.”
*
The car, recently picked up by its owner after not being driven for over a month, whirs delightfully as it barrels through the AC Hotel parking deck in downtown Asheville. One story. Two Stories. Three. The bumper-stickered sedan winds around each turn until it almost reaches open air.
Once achieving its desired height, the car slides into a spot facing the main drag, close to the elevator, so its passengers won’t have to walk too far in the chilly wind. The whirring stops, and the lights click off.
“I’ve never parked this high up before,” the owner of the car tells her roommate while climbing out of the driver’s seat.
“Neither have I. Holy shit, it’s cold out here,” the roommate replies.
The two friends rush to the elevator and press the button, bouncing up and down to keep warm in the briskness of late November.
When heading out to the grocery store earlier in the evening, the car’s owner received a message from her wifi provider telling her there was a service disruption. She was not pleased, to say the least, but the disruption would likely be solved soon, she hoped.
The friends continued to shop until their basket was full, but once returning to their shared townhouse on the east side, they noticed the neighborhood was blanketed in nightfall for the second time in recent months.
The first time the sheet of night took over, all of the groceries rotted in the fridge and fallen trees marred the entrance to their neighborhood, chasing the friends from their shared abode to different parts of the country to live with their families until the power returned.
The driver hoped this time would be different from the last, but the wind whipped through the homes as fiercely as that fateful night in September, causing a down powerline in the community once more.
A polite ding rang out as the elevator arrived to retrieve the friends from the deck, leaving the car alone to await their return. Stopping on the ground floor of the fancy hotel, the doors open, and the friends weave through the lobby out onto the quiet street.
They were anticipating an after-dinner treat from a local patisserie, but as soon as they stop in front of the doors, the light emanating from the open sign snuffs out.
“Now what do we do,” the roommate asks, annoyed.
“Follow me,” the driver replies, beelining across the road and down the empty sidewalk.
She hears music drifting from down the block, and her roommate’s complaints of the cold do not slow her down. She does not want to return to her apartment, where uncomfortable memories lurk in the dark.
The friends enter a dimly lit wine bar packed with visitors and a live band. They look at each other and decide they are not dressed appropriately for the venue, so they hurry back to the hotel lobby to get out of the icy draft and head back home.
As soon as they enter the hotel elevator once more, the driver sees a sign for Capella on 9, a rooftop bar.
“Wait, do you want to go there,” the driver asks, holding her breath for her roommate’s reply.
“You know what? Fuck it. We are already here,” the roommate resigns.
After pressing the button for the top floor, the lift jolts into motion, delivering the friends to their nightcap. The door slides open to reveal a glassed-in fireplace, vaulted ceilings and a sign noting, “Service is available at the bar until 11 p.m.”
“Cool,” the driver grins. “Let’s go.”
The bar hosts a singular bartender serving men in suits and a few couples who wandered in of their own accord. The friends sit, perusing the cocktail menu and admire the bottles stacked neatly behind the bar.
“What can I get for you guys tonight?” The tattooed bartender says, finishing up a cocktail she pours for another guest.
“Hey, I’ll just get a glass of Chardonnay. What do you want Ethan,” the driver asks her roommate.
The roommate orders a drink from the craft cocktail menu.
“Coming right up. So, where are y’all visiting from,” the bartender asks, attempting small talk with the friends while uncorking a bottle of wine.
“Oh, we actually live here. The power went out at our place and I just really don’t want to sit in the dark, you know. It’s been off for a few hours and we’d rather be out trying somewhere new instead of sitting in the dark. Fingers-crossed the groceries stay fresh. We just filled the fridge,” the driver replies, laughing in a self-deprecating manner.
The customer service facade melts from the bartender at once, recognizing one of her own.
“Oh my God, that sucks. I hope the power isn’t off at my place,” the bartender frowns, setting the full glass of wine down on the bar in front of the friends.
“You should be good unless you live in East Asheville. According to the powermap, it’s basically only our neighborhood,” the driver says.
The bartender turns away and grabs a house-made syrup from the fridge below, finishing the cocktail in a pretty flourish.
She slides the drink to the roommate and smiles, “It’s on the house guys. We gotta take care of each other right?”
She walks away to tend to another patron, and the roommate grabs a few bills out of their wallet for a tip. The friends thank the bartender and carry their drinks to a seating alcove near a window.
“That was nice of her,” the driver says to her friend, raising her eyebrows.
The friends look out the window to the dazzling city below and sip their drinks slowly, agreeing they should become rooftop bar aficionados.
On the walk back to the car, the driver thinks about how it really is the little things. Even if her power hasn’t returned by the time she gets home, she glows with the happiness of spending time with her friend and the kindness of a stranger in her community, knowing the darkness may not be as scary as she once believed.
“I will never forget what it felt like when we got into Kiersten’s living room,” I say to Sydney.
I remember it being around 9 p.m. on Sept 28 when we arrived in Charlotte. It was my first time at Kiersten’s house. I sat down on the couch, surrounded by her gaggle of happy dogs, met her older sister and finally held a working phone in my hands. For the first time, I could truly take in the destruction of my home city.
Watching her listening attentively to my words, I continue, “I remember when we were at the library earlier in the day. This girl showed me a video or picture sent to her of Tunnel Road and how it was under water. I said to her, “This is misinformation. This is not real. There is no way that you just showed me this AI photo of Tunnel Road,” and then having that sink in and having it be real when I thought it was fake. It was an insane feeling to have my worst fear play out in front of my eyes. I was thinking this is the worst case scenario to happen to Asheville.”
I take a breath as the memory of past hurricane experiences from my time living on the coast present themselves in my mind, adding, “I was expecting a little bit of rain and a little bit of wind and maybe there would be twigs in the road, but people lost absolutely everything. I’m so lucky I had somewhere to go and that you guys…”
I pause, tracing the crease in my pillow, “We were getting closer in our friendship too, but we were not as close as we are right now. I think the storm definitely solidified our friendship to a level I think it would not have reached in such a short period of time if we hadn’t been through this experience together.”
“I don’t think a lot of friendships have to go through survival situations like that. I would hope they don’t. I think it definitely strengthened our bond. Even though that situation put us each in very different headspaces and pushed us to our wits end. We still had each other’s backs. If I’m going to go through a disaster like that I would hope it was with my best friends or my parents,” Sydney says, punctuating her sentence with a quiet chuckle.
“Thank you for choosing me to be your disaster buddy,” I say, smiling at my friend.
