A Life In The Dark

"Bad things happen to everyone. Something worse than the other. Suffering through this cold every night and having to walk around in the dark. Everything seemed to be at its worst." this is all I could think of as the hurricane just began. I was mistaken the hurricane was just starting and everything was about to get much worse. "Brush your teeth and go to sleep." my dad told us. "Everything will be ok but if something actually happens just be ready. Go to the master bedroom and rest there I’ll wake you up if anything happens and if we need to evacuate" "ok I will take my brother and my sister to the bedroom and hopefully they get some rest" to my surprise they were fast asleep in a few minutes. Unlike me it took me awhile to fall asleep. As I laid there in the dark all I could hear were things crashing into the house and all the branches falling from the trees as if they were raindrops. You could hear the trees as they snapped like twigs. Who would have thought that such things were going to happen? As I laid there in the dark I just wondered if this was happening here, I wonder if this was nothing compared to what other people were living through. I just stared at the ceiling wondering and as I watched the room get darker and darker and darker until everything was pitch black.

Next thing I realized was waking up to my mom and dad talking in the living room. The hurricane had lightened up and it was time to go and see the damages the hurricane had committed. We drove around the neighborhood since we had no electricity at the house and no electricity meant there was no heat or light or entertainment. Where ever we drove there was a tree that was blocking the road and many things had been destroyed, everything was closed. The town appeared to be a ghost town; it was empty, quiet, and lifeless. I had never seen the town like this. There was nothing we could do for the day except wait in the house and see if the power came back on. It started to get dark and we still didn’t have any power. So I went upstairs to see what my cousin was doing. It was very bright in the area my cousin was at; he had almost ten candles illuminating the 2^nd floor. They were sitting around the table gambling their money. So I decided to join the game. In the end I won three times the money I started with. The next few day we continued playing cards but with out money this time. We got bored of the game by the 5^th day, so we went out to buy a new card game we ended up playing that for another 4 days.

Every day that passed by we had to heat water up to take hot showers. We needed to charge our phones in the car. I didn’t have service on my phone which was the worst. It was the worst because everyone was trying to contact us and when they couldn’t reach us they started thinking something bad had happened. When the signal started to get at least one or two bars I sat next to a window in the attic to make sure I had reception. Everything was hard work for nine days. Nothing seemed to get better. At least I got to spend time with my family. Everyday felt like hard work and everything seemed to be more difficult. On the ninth day I fell asleep.

 Then on the tenth day we got the power back at the house. It was 4 o’clock in the morning when the lights turned on. We were so happy we were going to have hot showers, a warm house, light, and food that weren’t going to spoil because the refrigerator was working once more. Who would have thought that we depended so much on technology? Everything we used in our everyday life we took for granted and we didn’t know how much we loved something until it was gone; but this experience brought our family closer together.