Hey, guys who never knew I existed until now! I don't exactly know who's reading this, but I'm writing it anyway, as writers do.

Anyway, this poem was really close to my heart at the time I wrote it. I've always called myself a storm-child, for multiple reasons. One is that I used to dance in the rain, like a dork, especially when there was lightning and thunder, like the daredevil I like to pretend to be. Another is that, when I was still a baby, I was sleeping in my mother's arms when lightning struck the tree in the front yard of our house. The story goes, the lightning shook the house, but I didn't even stir. The final reason is that I've always been obsessed with lightning, water, and wind and, in video games, powers that were either based off of them or as graceful and powerful as them. I've always felt like "storm-child" was my identity, my inner being.

One day, I met a boy. (Y'all know where this is going.) Before then, I had always felt kind of alone in the world. I thought I was the only storm-child. When I met this boy (let's call him Chad for privacy purposes), there was something different about him. As the poem describes, I felt I had found a kindred spirit, another storm-child. I never had to pretend around him, because we often feel the same about things. For once, I had met someone I could relate to, and not in a joking way. As soon as I saw him, I knew that this boy would understand me, no matter how confusing I tried to be.

It was liberating.

The only problem was, Chad's "storm" wasn't free to grow. I guess you could say I sensed it struggling in a losing battle against the sun that he forced into himself. In an attempt to nurture it, I tried to suppress my own storm (without inviting any "sun" into myself, thank you) so his storm could grow.

Eventually, Chad took ill. I found that even though the storm inside me had managed just fine before I'd met him, his absence actually weakened it. Worse, I had seen his storm less and less since the end of the previous summer. It had gotten to the point where I began to wonder if it was even there in the first place. Sometimes, I still do.

(If you're wondering, which you're probably not, Chad's fine now.)

Also, my hair is now in a pixie cut that I loved at first but quickly tired of, so that's the second-to-last line for ya.

(How do I close these things? I can't think of something original and... me.)