The Night I Wet Myself

...Or nearly did so.

Let me set the scene:

Thunderclouds moved towards Mibicuri like a mass of heavenly indigestion, obscuring the normally bright moon and stars. At about 10pm, the edge of the storm reached my house and rain began to beat down on my tin roof with a cacophony of sounds vaguely reminiscent of a middle school marching band. My room was illuminated for brief moments by the lightning flickering across the sky.

Miraculously, somewhere amongst the crashes of thunder and bursts of light, I drifted off to sleep for a few brief hours until the eye of the storm was overhead.

Around 3:00am the lightning and thunder that had been steadily moving towards my little house was now all around me. I lay awake watching my tin roof illuminate by flashes of light, when...

BLAM!

It was if the hammer of Thor had struck my roof. In what may have been only a millisecond, my entire room was lit to the brightness of day.

Lightning ripped through my house, frying the electrical wiring, and my nerves.  I was completely and irrevocably awake.

As the storm continued to unleash itself overhead I cowered in my bed with wild, random thoughts running through my mind.

“Was a foam mattress a conduit for electricity?”

“Is my computer charger fried?”

“Can lightning restart my heart?”

“Is there anything that will spoil in my fridge?”

As the storm showed no sign of abating, and sleep alluded me, I moved on from electrically themed contemplations to more random trains of thought, which included:

“If I had a billion dollars, I’d buy a motor home and cruise across the U.S.” 

“I did a really crappy job building my mousetrap propelled car in 12^th grade physics.”           

“If I ever get to visit home, I want to eat beer and bacon for every meal. Oh and butter. Yeah, butter”

I kept up with these wild, seemingly nonsensical musings in order to escape one nagging reality...

I had to pee. Really bad. And my toilet was outside. And it had a tin roof.

I considered a variety of options, which included making an impromptu “tinny,” or pulling an Amy Phoeler in Baby Momma and peeing in the sink. Instead I opted for the suffer in silence, text my sister, and play Tetris on my phone option.

Every time I’d convince myself that the storm had passed, I’d hear a rumble and see a flash that dissolved any resolve I had for making a mad dash outside.

So there I lay. Bright eyed and bushy tailed. No really. If I were a cat, my tail would resemble a pipe cleaner. My hair was literally, and figuratively, on end.

Hours later, after the eye of the storm moved on to other parts of Guyana, I could still feel the wrath of Thor echoing in my chest cavity.

And I still had to pee.