Last night, as I settled in for what comfort I could manage while entirely without power (it was warm and humid, I wasn’t able to use any of my sound generators to cover up the noise of my neighbors, and I was entirely without access to my CPAP machine), I wound up spending a lot of time thinking. It’s difficult to avoid when you can’t fill the air with podcasts like you normally do because you need to save your phone’s battery, when your various electronic entertainments are all inaccessible, and when you’ve got no way to position a candle so that reading a book won’t strain your eyes more than your day job of staring at monitors already has. Not a lot to do other than consider spending my tablet’s battery to read or sit and think about what it means to be without power in the modern era. Which is pretty tempting, to be completely honest. I do enjoy a bit of inward contemplation and there’s nothing quite like staring out the window at the unquiet night sky as you consider modernity. As I went to do this, though, my mind already full of thoughts about an impenetrably dark sky, the darkness of a world without city lights, and the slow hum of people doing their best to live on despite the sudden darkness and silence of the world around them, I found out that this little idealized version of my situation didn’t actually exist.

The thing that struck me first was that the night wasn’t very dark at all. At first I thought it was an optical illusion, that the roads around my apartment only seemed brighter because the bright streetlights and parking lot lights weren’t on, so I had nothing to wreck my night vision. When I looked up at the clouds, though, I could see that they were all brightly lit from beneath. Only my section of my city didn’t have power, after all. Other than my area and one other, as it turns out, there weren’t a lot of mass power-outages. Lots of individual people lost power as lines were brought down, transformers blew up, or local electrical and telephone poles were brought down, but only two larger areas lost power entirely. So, less than a quarter of a mile in any direction from my apartment, the city lights blazed as much as they ever did and the low, heavy cloud cover meant that all of it got bounced back to us. The longer I watched, the more light I noticed. In the lull after the storm, people sat in their cars parked on the street, headlights blazing in the dark, as they waited for something I couldn’t do more than guess at. Every so often, the world would flare with light and sound as firetrucks, ambulances, and police cars rushed past. Even the occasional person with a powerful flashlight would go walking or jogging past, their beam of light bouncing in time to their steps. The only true darkness was the stuff that existed inside my apartment, most notably within my bathroom as I’d go in and swing the door shut behind me as my hand reached for a switch I’d already forgotten would do nothing.

Despite the minor disaster that struck our city, there was no communal coming-together, at least not that I saw. There might have been one when the power died initially and people emerged from their apartments to see if it was just them or actually everyone and found themselves in a dim red hallway where the only light was the sullen glow of the exit sign. There may have been the almost ritualistic trading of candles, flashlights, batteries for phone charging, and general discussion of how long this might last, but I didn’t get home until almost an hour after the power had gone out due to spending the tornado warnings sitting in the bathroom/tornado shelter at work. When I’d gotten home, everyone seemed mostly settled and all I had to do was settle into my too-quiet apartment with my large stock of plain white pillar candles and eat whatever food was going to melt or quickly go bad from my freezer and refrigerator. Which I was probably going to do anyway since I was exhausted and eating dinner at half past nine in the evening is often a piecemeal, scattershot effort at the best of times. Even outside, despite the lights I occasionally saw moving around, no one was gathering to talk or pull tree branches off cars or even just take comfort in their neighbor’s company. Those who emerged quickly went into their cars and either drove away, presumably to somewhere with power, or just stayed there until I’d grown tired enough to sleep despite my discomforts.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Each storm and minor disaster is its own beast entirely and I have a bit of a tendency to romanticize things that don’t need it or would even be better off without it, so it doesn’t really surprise me that things didn’t quite play out the way I’d imagined. The most striking part of it, really, was just how disconnected from it all I felt. I’d spent my tornado warnings alone, mostly, sitting in a bathroom while the only other person I saw that late at night was wondering around between shelters because he was bored. I got home long (relatively speaking, anyway) after the power had gone out and the flurry of mutual activity had passed without me. I was settling in to deal with the storm and its fallout well after everyone else already had. All of my friends, even the ones who live about two blocks away from me, didn’t lose power like I had, so there was no social connection for me to make to other people even on the internet.

I’m used to feeling more connected to other people during moments like this, as it is very easy to imagine other people doing the things I’m doing as we go through the process of dealing with severe weather, so this week was a bit of an unsettling shock that I did not appreciate. It made me almost glad to go into work where, even if no one else had lost power or had already gotten theirs back by the time I spoke to them, at least I wasn’t actually alone anymore. Except in the fact that I had to get to work early so I could use the company showers since I didn’t want to risk running out of water at home. I’m grateful that the showers were available, but it was still a weird experience to know that I’m the only person using them because I can’t shower at home rather than because I’d been working out or had run/biked into the office. I don’t really feel bad about any of it. Just weird. Removed. And more than a little anxious about just how many days of storms are forecast for the week ahead…