Maybe one day this will kill her.

But she doesn’t care.  Not now.  Drops splash against the windowpane and she finds herself outside, hobbling into the woods, heart hammering, fingers slick with raindrops from the moments before the black umbrella covered her bald head.

She picks her way through the underbrush—sometimes with shoes, usually without—to a narrow wisp of a path, snaking its way to a small pond.  She made the trail herself.  Not intentionally, of course, but over the past year she has worn down nature itself, revealing the soft brown loam under the fuzzy foot of the forest.  A tree root makes her stumble, and she falls, catching herself with a weak hand.

Lightning flashes high above the treetops.  Her breath hitches, her neck snaps back, and she waits, staring into the dark canopy above her.  When she returns to herself, she finds her face and the top of her shoulders are wet.  She’ll be soaked through twice over by the time it finishes and she wonders again, like she always does, why she bothers with the umbrella at all.  Another brilliant spark—like a flash bulb on an old camera—shoots out from a cloud.  Thunder cracks and crashes; her eyes dazzle, her ears ring, a thrill runs up her spine and tingles through her nearly-useless body.

This will kill her one day.

As a child, she would press her nose to the enormous glass window at the front of her house and watch the clouds roiling and roaming, knowing there were magical bits of light swarming within, waiting for the right instant to erupt.  Come away from the window, dear, it isn’t safe.

Later, she immersed herself in her passion.  This is a dangerous storm.  Take shelter immediately.

And now?  Now, it has all been taken away from her.  Day after day, she finds herself tethered to machines, barred from a storm’s fierce energy by white coats and curtains.

But finally, tonight, with the pond before her and the storm wrapping around her, she is wholly herself.  The umbrella lies abandoned somewhere in the dense tangle of trees and she reclines across the flat rock that rests half in the pond and half out, like it can’t quite decide what it likes best.

The shower becomes a frenzied torrent and she spreads her delicate arms wide to welcome it.  She is cold, so cold, but the water is warm and it pelts a soothing pattern over her weary bones.

A thin scar races across the sky, followed a fraction of a moment later by a sharp clap.  Her eyelids flutter closed.  Tired, so tired.  The fervency, the power of the swirling winds—she sometimes wishes she could harness it.

But no, she reconsiders.  If she could draw even the slightest portion of its energy, the majesty would be lost.  The uncontrollable wildness is what she loves most.

One day soon,
she thinks,
this will—

Her toes slide into the water

as the next bolt

shatters

the surface.