Love is the Thing with Lightning

Sept 15, 2020 | Raquel Sequeira TD ‘21+.5

The world always darkens before a storm. Not just the sky, but the air itself, as if someone has flipped the switch for dusk too early. Every blade of grass seems to inhale with excitement and fear. For me, that excitement and fear is partially a memory: of a violent wind sweeping from the yellow sky into the New Haven streets as raindrops begin to fall on me and the boy beside me; of darting into the library just as a tree branch crashes behind us; of my heart racing like the wind and my mind crackling like the lightning and every word I say filling the air between us like a cloud ready to burst. 

Why was I afraid? Fear is a response to danger or risk. But what risk was there when I knew he felt for me as I do for him?  “I’m terrified that if I say something, I’ll push him away and lose him forever.” I’d heard friends say it countless times. You will, I thought. We all will, eventually. It’s not a risk, but a certainty. 

Despite the gothic romance of the storm raging outside and the quiet intimacy of the Slavic Reading Room, fear wins the day in my memory. We had parted ways and said nothing.

A clap of thunder returns me to the present, standing in the kitchen. I watch an unpretentious pencil carve a jaunty curve out of the nothingness of a page. Another follows, then another, as I look over the shoulder of my brother. He looks a little like me when you squint or when both we smile. I myself am squinting at the lines—like a quizzical God at the chaos of pre-Creation—and now at the face of my brother. When I look back at the page, I let out a breath at the life that has emerged upon it.

My brother appears to shrink into the paper—or am I floating away?—and joins the world of his pencil lines. Not again, I think, feeling a familiar sense of vertigo as I watch him wander among graphite arches of his drawing like the Spanish painter under his towering murals. He grins up at me.

“Where did you learn to do that?” I ask. I try to recall the motion of the pencil as he drew. The thought of all that he might be able to see terrifies me. Perhaps the world for him is colored by a dazzlingly richer rainbow. Philosophers might well ask, “Is your red the same as my red?” and ponder the ineffability of qualia. My brother gets bored when I try to discuss it with him. 

I leave him to his world, turning just in time to brace myself for a bronze-colored fastball of hair and limb. My other, younger brother tackles me to the couch. We are laughing, but it hurts me to recognize the glint of viciousness behind his smile and realize that it is mine. My parents don’t have to tell me I was just like this at his age.

When he was younger, I had nightmares about his tiny body shattering like glass. Now when I throw him down roughly, he bounces back up—“I’m fine!” But I know that his mind, if not his body, is more like a slab of wet cement than a rubber ball.  

From before we are born and even until we die, our environment leaves imprints on our identity. Chaos theory says that the flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a tornado. A hair’s-breadth change of the cosmological dials and darkness would have stayed over the face of the deep. The same is true of the biochemical dials of our embodied selves. Though my brother and I share genes and personalities, we are separated by infinite degrees of epigenetic freedom. Now I worry that every impatient word to him is a tiny nudge of the dial that will send him careening away from me. 

Inevitably, I hit too hard. Chide his trash-talking too angrily. He storms to his room to simmer in self-pity.  My dad peeks his head around the corner. We communicate without language. I apologize with a grimace, he forgives me with a sigh. 

Language is far too threadbare a thing to bridge even the most generous minds, and even the most generous minds are limited by their own experience. Misunderstanding is a guarantee. Yet somehow, as one son languishes in a world of impersonal lines and shapes, and the other on a simmering planet ready to erupt at a word, my father finds a daughter sharing his square foot of universe. We use up every inch of language with maximum efficiency and maximum delight, almost transcending its limits. Almost, but not quite. 

My father crosses the room in two abnormally long strides and hunches his tall body to slip into my brother’s room. I’m surprised by the little curl of resentment that rises in me as he shuts the door behind him. Our near-constant closeness makes moments of separation more painful. One closed door and I feel cheated. I want him to shrink down to fit inside my mind more completely. But when the fabric of our love is stretched taut, I see light coming through the gaps and know that we are as human as everyone else. I see myself reflected in my sulking brother, my anger in his anger. 

I leave the couch to open the door and watch the rain. I wish it could cleanse me. The “spouting cataracts and hurricanoes” shame my small, greedy love, which (like Shakespeare’s King Lear) I treat as something to be measured and earned. [1] I step out into the downpour.

In ignorance and arrogance we cheapen relationships—both human and divine—by believing that they are within our control and comprehension.  Kierkegaard tried to awaken us to the “absurdity” of opening ourselves to others given the gaps of language and mind—of loving, knowing you will lose. 

A crack of lightning much too close knocks me off my feet. I sit stunned. Thunder envelops me.

Why do we do it? Why be known deeply enough to be deeply hurt? I think the definition of love is that it is self-justifying: it’s the only thing that justifies all that it costs. It’s why God created, though evil would come along with good and rejection with relationship. “It’s your existence I love you for, mainly,” says the old father to his young son. [2]

Every relationship requires an ongoing leap of faith that misunderstanding can be redeemed. And the leap of faith is a thing of “fear and trembling”—fear and excitement. A storm is the incarnation of intangible forces of weather, the sky coming to earth. Closeness with another incarnate mind is another wonder in the face of which we are so very, very small. 

In the mundane, cloudless moments, our brain prevents us from being overwhelmed by that hugeness. It takes an effort to push the filter aside, feel a stratospheric vertigo, and marvel before we let it fall again. I feel the same vertigo when I realize that love exists not in spite of but because of misunderstanding and loss.

The rain does cleanse me. Water soothes the lightning and slakes the earth. I remember a photo of my dad holding me as a sleeping infant against his chest in the shower. I remember all the conversations, as plenteous as the raindrops, where telepathic understanding burst like lightning through the barrier of language. My little brother flies out of the house and out of his gloom to play in the rain, one of his favorite things. Lightning illuminates the yard again, and I see the outlines of trees as I never have before, almost alive in the color-negative world. I want to ask my other brother to draw them.

The storm ends. The next day, more than two years after sheltering with the boy in the library, I sit with him in a far more peaceful dusk. For a moment I’m filled with a reckless desire to shatter the silence between us, behind which we store memories of that brief time of vulnerability. I take a deep breath, and I marvel at the beauty of the night.

“Love is hairy, absurd, and dangerous. Of course it’s sometimes mundane and boring too, but only in the way that if you had a pet python named Carl you’d probably get used to him after a while…and then once in a while you’d catch a glimpse of the terrarium in the corner and think holy sh*t I live with this thing that could kill me, Carl could totally kill me, and then you’d walk over and lift Carl out of his terrarium and marvel not only that Carl chooses every day not to kill you but that he exists in this world at all.” [3]

1. William Shakespeare, King Lear (3.2.2).

2. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (53).

3. Amy Bonnaffons, “In Praise of Weird Literary Romances,” LitHub. https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-weird-literary-romances/ 

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