This tornado loves you.

So I’ve got tornadoes on my tiny mind.

Yep.

This isn’t unique. I think about tornadoes a lot, since those twisty, terrifying things are one of my phobias, and the only one that I’m fascinated with enough to watch videos about and do school reports on (sorry, ghosts, alligators and being alone!) They show up in my dreams, hopping rivers and downing planes and ruining family picnics.

When I was four, there was one that passed about a quarter mile from my house, and I remember sitting with my mother, dog and baby sister in the hallway, listening for the sound of a freight train. Which is what tornadoes make. Because they’re scary as shit.

Like, for example:

• The average tornado is 500 feet wide. Average. That is the width of one and a half football fields.
• The widest tornado ever recorded was 2.5 miles wide. That’s right. Think about how far you can run in 25 minutes. Then, imagine everything you passed on that jog sucked right on up into a demon cloud. Every house, every tree, every cat.
• The longest tornado was on the ground for 219 miles. That, for example, could be Southeast Portland to Walla Walla, Wash.
• Before a tornado comes, the sky turns yellow. Just to remind you of the biblical-style destruction that’s about to come.

Oh, you know, the usual. Just cruisin' around, destroyin', whistlin' a creepy trainlike whistle.

But in a certain way, these things kind of make me adore tornadoes. They come from the biggest and scariest thunderstorms, they shake your house, you have no control. It’s a little bit like love, maybe?

And, for whatever  reason, I feel like I have had more of my fair share of tornado experiences. Second-hand, mostly, like the tornado wanted to get my number but in the end she was too shy. Or at least I did in 2007, which was truly the Year of the Tornado for me.

In January, a tornado ripped through my old neighborhood in New Orleans, smashing a window of the cafe where I’d worked in college and ruining ex-boyfriend B’s deck and forever claiming his trusty camper chairs (though he was lucky — it knocked down the house next to his). Later that year, one would cut an angry gash through the county I covered. It would knock down a house, one with a mother and three young kids sleeping inside. Two of the kids, in turn, would be life flighted to Jackson with severe head injuries. Later that same day, I would come across the father, who had flown in from the oil rig where he was working offshore, and was sitting and sobbing on the remains of his house. Just a big, splintery pile, with Precious Moments figurines and a Confederate flag mixed in with siding and muddy carpet. For a second, I considered asking him how does he spell his daughter’s name? but then thought better of it.

A month later, one headed through my neighborhood during a thunderstorm.

That night, I was laying in bed, listening for train whistle sounds, jet engine sounds, whatever it was. I’d woken up to a sea of angry red on the television. Normally, the channel went off the air at 1:30 a.m., but what with the tornadoes, they’d elected instead to just air the emergency alert and a Doppler map. They thought the tornado was headed down Hardy Street, but they weren’t sure. Thunder kept exploding, louder than anything I’d been able to imagine previously. My cats were wigging out. I wondered what to do, if I should leave my rickety carriage house apartment and head down to the main house? But what about the cats? I couldn’t carry both of them through pouring rain and lightning. I considered for a second putting them in the dryer, on the theory that nothing could fall on them and crush them. I thought about how, in the morning, if my house hadn’t fallen down, I would go and get a bike helmet. I would keep this bike helmet by my bed, and if a tornado came, my safety plan would for sure would be to put the cats in the dryer, and then pull on the bike helmet, and then pull my mattress on top of me. This would definitely protect me, I thought.

No, it wouldn't.

But mostly I felt afraid in that lonely way, with the knowledge that if there were someone, anyone, in the house with me, we would cling together, wearing our matching bike helmets, and things would seem a lot more tolerable than they were at that moment.

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