I always sleep through windstorms. On our way home from a technical theatre conference in Kentucky one year, I drove with Molly and Lindsey to get on the better deal airline in Nashville. Four tornadoes were growing in Tennessee that afternoon and surrounded the area, making flight impossible until the next morning. In our hotel room, I sawed logs while they huddled by the window, their eyes shooting from the funnels outside to the weathercaster’s updates on cable.

After the 100 MPH Labor Day storm in Syracuse that closed schools for a week and turned all the village neighborhoods inside out, I woke from a dead night’s sleep to an apocalyptic Mott Road. I was fourteen and wondered what dream found its way into my backyard. No one else could sleep that night. I was zonked.

Windstorms are easy. They break your house or they don’t. You die or you clean up. I wish relationships were so easy as weather.

Daren, so proud and smug, is asleep on the couch now. He’s snoring again. His graphic novel, The Tainted Egg Epidemic, is folded over his chest. By the cover, I can’t tell if it’s a thriller or a comedy.

His glasses match his personality, muted and kind in a soft blue. Daren could never see me from here. Washing my hands again and again from the kitchen, I love watching him across the street. I can see right across the street, through the window blinds and into his front room. My vision is perfect and always has been.

Doing the dishes is the most calming chore there is. It’s also my way of catching Daren when Kathy isn’t there. Wives are easy, though. I wish relationships were so easy as wives. I’ll blow him bubbles through the dishes and he’ll wake up from his nap. He’ll come out from under his afternoon reading, stretch, walk shoeless over the hot pavement and knock on my door. I’m that magical. Then again, magic is easy, too.

I was twelve when I stood with Kevin in my parents’ bathtub. We clicked off the light switch and pulled the shower curtain closed to make the place dark as can be. Together we wished for the super powers we admired in X-Men mutant comics.

My magic went to my head years later. Now, I can crack twenty different locks with my eyes closed. I can leap through a hoop of fire better than circus poodles. I can bid a snarling raccoon to make me buttermilk pancakes.

Magic doesn’t always work in my favor. Sometimes it makes a maniac out of my brain. Sometimes banshees scream from my frontal lobe into my inner ear. Sometimes I can only see blinding white for twelve-hour segments. When the magic is that terrible, even washing dishes won’t calm me and I wish my hands would come off in the soap. Then, all I can do is run from the havoc our brain surging beams created that Saturday afternoon following cartoons and Cocoa Puffs.

When I run, I’m an animal. I draw the energy from the earth’s guts, the core, the fire. Running, I used to say, I would only do when being chased. Now, whenever my brain turns against me, it is life and death for miles at a time. Four and five miles. Seven miles. Ten miles. Twenty. I can push a semi-truck with all the heat fueling my gut. I push past fear, past the swarming shadow people and growling voices. I reconnect body to brain.

I go five miles and finally cancel out that wish Kevin and I made. Human again, I reunite body, mind and spirit to function in the day-to-day world. That is all it takes. Still I wish I could be normal like Kathy and Daren without having to sprint the shadow demons away. I wish I could have a Daren without pulling him close with magic and that I could read graphic novels like The Tainted Egg Epidemic without knowing what it’s like to live them. I wish I were more petrified of windstorms than my brain.