Two years after Fifth Harmony formed, I was in fifth grade and fearless. To me, 7/27 wasn't a day of celebrating an album, or drooling over Lauren Jauregui. Back then, it was just my ex-best-friend-who-was-actually-a-megabitch's birthday. 

Anyway, that day I wasn't thinking about fear. But if I were to list my fears, I'd list spiders, begrudgingly, because I'm tough but those are scary little fuckers. Then I'd go on to add that I'm afraid of my family dying, even though that's so far out of reach in my mind that it doesn't even seem real. Finally, I'd add that I was afraid I was a megabitch, because it was in fifth grade that I first met one of my closest companions, self-hatred.

The list expanded when a hailstorm smashed in my windows, later that day. Standing outside, once the storm cleared, feeling the sting of unnaturally cool air against my skin and struggling to wrap my hand around the ball of ice that had assaulted my house, I was terrified.

So I did the only thing that any rational person with an irrational fear would do, and researched the hell out of weather. Now, in 2019, I could probably show up at a meteorology station and get a job, no college training required.

Five years later, it's 7/27/2019. My fear is gone and honestly, I get excited to see storms. I spend the day celebrating the birth of Fifth Harmony in the best way possible: I sing/guitar through the entire album, and then I release a remix of 5H rapping about bananas. It's lit and if you go to my soundcloud (via my profile) you can find it.

It's been five years and I'm fine.

It's the day after that, when everything goes to shit. It started when I was in my room. I woke up with zero motivation to do anything, so I spent the day in a state of existing before I realized that I could watch TV! So I started watching The Good Place. It was as I watched the voice of Ana freak out about her afterlife when it started hailing. 

I admit, I got a little paranoid. The basic pattern of tornadic weather is this: first, the heavy hail core passes through. The little ice balls are evident of circulation in the massive cloud, where there's an updraft to push rain into the stratosphere. Once it gets heavy enough, it falls. The bigger the hail, the stronger the updraft.

The problem is that, as Miley Cyrus once sang, what goes up must come down. So if there's an updraft strong enough to pepper me with penny-sized hail, then somewhere there's a downdraft. If that downdraft is spinning, then...well, it's the same idea as when you run your hand through a bathtub. In front of your hand, there's a buildup of water as you push it out of the way. Behind your hand, water rushes in to fill the void, and on the edge of your hand, a little swirl forms. If that swirl has a downdraft attached, then it touches down to the ground.

So I was paranoid enough to pause The Good Place and gaze out the window in fear. There were a few gentle gusts, but for the most part, the hail fell to the ground calmly, maybe bouncing once before settling amongst blades of grass. Since that seemed to be fine, I resumed the episode.

Then it got calm.

If there is a cycle, where something goes up and something else goes down, then there's a part where the drafts just cross over. Since the air is moving sideways, there's no reason for it to rain. So this silence, this eye of the storm that I found myself in, is Very Alarming. 

This is when I started to feel terrified.

I opened up my weather app, and got a glimpse of two lumps of heavy rain, dated ten minutes ago. I didn't know if they had merged, or if a hook echo had formed. I also didn't know why it hadn't refreshed. Either way, there was a severe warning waiting for me, describing penny sized hail and 60mph wind gusts.

Maybe five minutes later, the wind gusts were not 60mph. 60 seemed painfully slow in comparison. The wind outside was like that one time a hurricane passed over where my aunt lived in Florida. I had been watching over my mom's shoulder as she watched the weather channel, and some deranged reporter was leaning against the wind, describing what was going on, before some debris narrowly missed her and she decided to pack up and flee. I was pretty sure that the winds had reached 80mph. That's a high-end EF0 tornado on the Fujita scale, or a Category 1 hurricane.

This was the point when I started yelling at my family to go downstairs. I extracted my sister from the midst of her shower. My mom picked up the dog, who's afraid of stairs, and I stopped my dog from resisting her descent by holding her paws with my own violently trembling hands. Some water bottles were filled, and then I yelled at the family to get the fuck downstairs, as the wind gusted harder than I imagined possible, and a horrific snap sounded outside.

Soon, we were huddled in my downstairs studio, comforting the dog, while I prayed to who-knows-what for there to not be a tornado.

After the softball-sized hail of 2014, tornadoes had become a bit more than a doom swirl. I mean, tornadoes are fucking scary, but they started to show up in my nightmares. Like tornadoes, the other forces in my life (like my parents, my sister, people's expectations that I constantly disappointed) were savage and demanding, and made me feel out of control. So whenever things got out of hand, I would have nightmares about being run over by a tornado. For it to be actually happening was literally a nightmare come to life.

I tried to obsessively check my weather app for a hook echo, to see if there was a tornado bearing down on me, and then the power blinked out.

So then my idiot family decided to go upstairs. My sister wanted clothes (I had interrupted her shower). My moms wanted to gawk and get flashlights. I cuddled my dog in the dark, wondering if I was about to be an orphan.

Eventually I emerged, and I had no clue what had just went down. Well, actually I did know what had "went down"--a limb from the maple, the spruce in my front yard (over my sister's friend's parking spot), and half of the neighbor's massive willow tree, taking up probably half of their lawn and popping into ours. 

What I didn't know was what had happened. Was it a tornado or a massive gust? And when the hell would I get power back? I wanted to watch those episodes of The Good Place, my phone was at 11%, and I had about 12 books that I was halfway through on Wattpad. 

So we (my gay parents and I) went for a walk. What I learned was that there were similar downed trees, mangled and twisted, following a straight-line path, with very isolated damage. Almost as if the sky had dragged a sword through the ground and taken the weakest limbs. Well, maybe not a sword. It could be any conic object, like a pen. Except, it'd have to be spinning, in order to mangle the trees in the way they are, and it'd have to be attached to a thicc gust. Like the whirlpool that forms on the edge of a kayak paddle. Or...could it be...a tornado?

It's an undiagnosed tornado. Nobody got a picture of it. But, I mean, come on! It makes sense. Those 80mph winds? The straight-line path? The warping of the damage? The hail core that passed by beforehand? If there wasn't at least a funnel cloud, or a wall cloud, then you can call me Lauren Jauregui and out me before I'm ready.

If it weren't so terrifying, I would be fascinated. The physics behind it are amazing! Like the fact that my (hand-me-down, and currently broken) car got cleaned by the wind alone? It's because it was behind the house, and obviously the tornado caused diffraction behind the house, concentrating the winds on the car, like a massive hair dryer. And plotting the damage points on a map of my subdivision was lit. I would attach a picture, except, you know...it's a map. With my house in it.

So, um, yeah. I'm afraid of storms again. The day after that, the same storm warning came back, and kicked my power out to make room for it. I was home alone and freaked out, hiding in the bathroom (central room on the first floor) with my dog, since I couldn't get her downstairs. Every gust of wind that smoothed over the pond in my backyard struck fear in my heart. When the rain started pelting the ground, harder than a showerhead at the public pool, dread settled in my chest. My favorite author updated on Wattpad, moments before the power went out, and I told the people that no, I couldn't read it now, because I'm about to die. Because those are the same symptoms of the tornado that had moseyed into my neighborhood the week before.

So then there's the stuff that happened afterward. Like, I really wanted to write down what happened, so that I could sort through my feelings, but then MY FUCKING SPACEBAR BROKE! My typing speed dropped to, like, a fifth (harmony) of what it was. I.tried.writing.what.had.happened,.but.by.the.time.I.reached.mid-sentence,.I.forgot.what.I.was.going.to.say.or.I.decided.that.it.was.badly.worded.and.rewrote.it. So I had to buy an external keyboard, to accompany my external mouse, external cooling system, and broken speakers. Isn't it fun being a writer and music producer when you're broke as fuck and can't buy a new computer?

Then I had to cut up trees. It's surprisingly fun to play with sticks and saws. But now I have to see my therapist because I don't know what the fuck is going on with my parents and our flawed relationship. 

Hey, at least it happened when I didn't have lyric ideas! Now I've found Austin Mahone, Hot Chelle Rae, and Becky G music. Whoever writes Mahone is a melodic genius and I have a few things to learn. "What About Love" is epic. Off topic. Point is, now I'm inspired, just in time, because the three downed trees are now cut up and at the edge of my driveway. 

Driving back from my vocal lesson, I was hit with this strange feeling of lightness. I wanted to sing (but my voice was raw because I have bad technique) and dance and smile and kiss the girl who'd starred in my dream last night. (Get your dirty minds out of here, my dream was that I sat next to her at lunch, we had fun just the two of us, someone asked if we were dating, and when I denied it, she said that she would like to kiss me, and then we kissed, and then I woke up disappointed that it wasn't real). 

I think I was happy, and I have no clue what to do with it, so I'm seeing my therapist, because I'm fucking scared that my happiness will disappear, and very confused as to why I'm finally happy after a tornado.