​The Death of a Lightning Bolt

That day it rained like never before. The air was heavy; the sky, endless and gray. I’d been tired of living for a long time. Revolver in hand, lying in bed, I told myself, “This is it.” I pulled the trigger, shaking, and the shot found its mark. The pain lasted only a few seconds; then cordite and metal spread across my tongue, and I let myself die. No goodbyes, no letters, no last meal. “It’s done,” I remember thinking. I don’t exist anymore.

Or maybe I stopped existing as a human, because what happened next didn’t fit any idea of life or death I’d ever had. I felt a magnet pulling me upward. An immense charge burst in my chest; first a rough tingling, then a tremor. My body became an earthquake climbing the sky. I thought I was an angel now, or a spirit, doomed to fly the way I’d always dreamed. But when I looked down, I understood how wrong I was.

I was the storm.

The storm rolling in took me with it. I floated—abrasive, bright, alive with energy; conscious and yet completely alone. I fused with nature: the wet fury of endless rain became part of my new anatomy. The air smelled like raw ozone; the wind carried wet earth; thunder, muffled, thumped inside me like a borrowed heart.

Every movement—and they were no longer hands—slashed out a strip of electricity. I was a vast, unstable bolt inside water that heaped itself, violent and restless. I knew that, cruelly, the moment I touched ground my life would end again, and for good. A strange terror bloomed: not fear of death—I’d already died—but the realization that I might have preferred not to.

Adrift, I slid through the storm, crackling, shining, shivering among clouds. Each moment slipped away. Each second, a whole life. For the first time I saw existence itself: rain bending light, wind combing the grass, the sun hiding behind the gray. A great sadness and a great joy braided themselves into my discharge. These were the final instants, yes, but they were mine.

At last I understood it was all perspective. Down on the ground, you feel small. Up here, among clouds and cold water, I finally felt part of the whole. I was given storm; someone else will be given a tree in dry earth.

Then I wanted someone to see me. Just once, one last time. Far below, at an uncountable distance, a kid stood under an umbrella, phone raised, trying to catch my storm. I poured all my energy, all my brief awareness, into him. I readied myself to fall, curving and dancing; waiting, aiming, wanting.

When I finally struck, a few yards from the boy, I imagined him watching: his camera capturing my second death; a smile unfurling across his face. A smile I hadn’t worn in a long time. In that instant I wanted to be a kid again—alive, laughing, innocent.

And then I wasn’t. Only a flash remained on a wet screen, and a scar of light across the grass.