Lightning Rod

I imagine that I am standing in a big open field and it's storming all around me. I stand perfectly still; arms glued to my sides, knees locked and gazing straight ahead. Rain drips down my nose and soaks into my hair until each clump is saturated and bloated. Down near the ground, the grass brushes against my naked legs and feet, but I resist the urge to react.

Standing there trying to distract myself from moving, I think back to the other day when my friend was telling me about how humans can conduct electricity. I picture myself running around a house and every time that I pass an outlet small veins of electron matter jump out and stick to me. It would be comical except that in my dream I can't stop collecting these threads. I have a train of them streaming out from my body following me everywhere I go. I keep running around the house, which just gets me more and more tangled up with them. Eventually I run so far and long that I end up back here in the field, singularly standing and thinking. The electricity still covers me and I look around to see that the lines are streaming out around me like a parachute, covering the entire field.

I'm puzzling on these crazy electrical pathways when I begin to feel an immense overwhelming, anguishing tingling. It starts on the sole of my right foot and quickly travels up to my ears, then my nose and my forehead. I want so badly to scratch my nose but I don't move a muscle because in that moment I realize what's coming next.

The funny thing is that when the lightning hits I don't feel a thing. All the restlessness of before has gone and I'm left with the eerie sensation of time slowing down. The lightning rolls through me like a wave; each spot that it hits flops me back and forth like a rag doll breaking off the precious blue strands. Only when I am nearly at the point of breaking in half does it finally cease.

For a while afterwards I think that I stand and appreciate the silence of the end of a storm, which is actually an excuse, because my legs feel cemented in the ground and I really just don't want to move yet. After what seems like hours I finally hear someone calling my name in the distance. I begin walking, slowly, exercising my legs so they know how to act again. As I walk away I don't look back at the field. I know that there are not many real places where you feel like a lightning rod, and I don't want to see what I have left behind.

*originally published here on March 11, 2011. Of all the things I've ever written this is the one that shows up the most often in my thoughts, so I'm publishing it again.