Monday, July 08, 2013

It's All About Timing

Right now, I'm sitting comfortably on my sofa, drinking my lemon-flavoured sparkling water, listening to the cars honking outside my window. If I had been ten minutes later getting home, I could have been one of the honking cars.

The clouds were pitch black when I came out of the home improvement store. I thought to myself, forget about going to the supermarket to buy milk, I better get the heck out of here. Halfway home, I looked in my rear view mirror and blinked as I saw a curtain of rain behind me. Then it reached my car. It was the kind of rain where having an umbrella was a complete waste of time; you were going to get soaked from the water spraying upwards from the ground and sideways from the wind. I haven't been in the middle of a deluge like that for quite some time. It reminded me of the black rain warning I experienced just over a month ago in Hong Kong. I carefully dodged the spontaneous lakes on the street that would likely swallow my poor little car and eventually made it home safely.

I got off the elevator and opened my door. The first thing I did was turn on the news. I did a quick double take when I saw the reporter standing in a sunny intersection but soon realized that she was reporting from the tragic train derailment site in Quebec. Then the power went off.

I went out on my balcony and saw that my building was not the only one with no lights. In fact, I couldn't see any building with power in any direction. Traffic was already slow from the rain and was now a chaotic mess as aggravated drivers decided to forgo the four-way stop rule at the blacked out intersections. I grabbed a drink quickly from my fridge and sat down. I called my parents to check on them and learned that they also had no power. Today is their wedding anniversary, but a known scheduling conflict had forced us several weeks ago to plan their dinner for tomorrow.

Trying my best not to feel smug right now.

"Want you to see everything, want you to see all of the lights"

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