Two years after Fifth Harmony formed, I was in fifth grade and fearless. To me, 7/27 wasn't a day of celebrating an album, or drooling over Lauren Jauregui. Back then, it was just my ex-best-friend-who-was-actually-a-megabitch's birthday.
Anyway, that day I wasn't thinking about fear. But if I were to list my fears, I'd list spiders, begrudgingly, because I'm tough but those are scary little fuckers. Then I'd go on to add that I'm afraid of my family dying, even though that's so far out of reach in my mind that it doesn't even seem real. Finally, I'd add that I was afraid I was a megabitch, because it was in fifth grade that I first met one of my closest companions, self-hatred.
The list expanded when a hailstorm smashed in my windows, later that day. Standing outside, once the storm cleared, feeling the sting of unnaturally cool air against my skin and struggling to wrap my hand around the ball of ice that had assaulted my house, I was terrified.
So I did the only thing that any rational person with an irrational fear would do, and researched the hell out of weather. Now, in 2019, I could probably show up at a meteorology station and get a job, no college training required.
Five years later, it's 7/27/2019. My fear is gone and honestly, I get excited to see storms. I spend the day celebrating the birth of Fifth Harmony in the best way possible: I sing/guitar through the entire album, and then I release a remix of 5H rapping about bananas. It's lit and if you go to my soundcloud (via my profile) you can find it.
It's been five years and I'm fine.
It's the day after that, when everything goes to shit. It started when I was in my room. I woke up with zero motivation to do anything, so I spent the day in a state of existing before I realized that I could watch TV! So I started watching The Good Place. It was as I watched the voice of Ana freak out about her afterlife when it started hailing.
I admit, I got a little paranoid. The basic pattern of tornadic weather is this: first, the heavy hail core passes through. The little ice balls are evident of circulation in the massive cloud, where there's an updraft to push rain into the stratosphere. Once it gets heavy enough, it falls. The bigger the hail, the stronger the updraft.
The problem is that, as Miley Cyrus once sang, what goes up must come down. So if there's an updraft strong enough to pepper me with penny-sized hail, then somewhere there's a downdraft. If that downdraft is spinning, then...well, it's the same idea as when you run your hand through a bathtub. In front of your hand, there's a buildup of water as you push it out of the way. Behind your hand, water rushes in to fill the void, and on the edge of your hand, a little swirl forms. If that swirl has a downdraft attached, then it touches down to the ground.
So I was paranoid enough to pause The Good Place and gaze out the window in fear. There were a few gentle gusts, but for the most part, the hail fell to the ground calmly, maybe bouncing once before settling amongst blades of grass. Since that seemed to be fine, I resumed the episode.
Then it got calm.
If there is a cycle, where something goes up and something else goes down, then there's a part where the drafts just cross over. Since the air is moving sideways, there's no reason for it to rain. So this silence, this eye of the storm that I found myself in, is Very Alarming.
This is when I started to feel terrified.
I opened up my weather app, and got a glimpse of two lumps of heavy rain, dated ten minutes ago. I didn't know if they had merged, or if a hook echo had formed. I also didn't know why it hadn't refreshed. Either way, there was a severe warning waiting for me, describing penny sized hail and 60mph wind gusts.
Maybe five minutes later, the wind gusts were not 60mph. 60 seemed painfully slow in comparison. The wind outside was like that one time a hurricane passed over where my aunt lived in Florida. I had been watching over my mom's shoulder as she watched the weather channel, and some deranged reporter was leaning against the wind, describing what was going on, before some debris narrowly missed her and she decided to pack up and flee. I was pretty sure that the winds had reached 80mph. That's a high-end EF0 tornado on the Fujita scale, or a Category 1 hurricane.
