‘Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change’

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Standing on my balcony, staring at city lights, so bright. When I wake up I see silver lights. The storm slowly moves closer across the bay, a tempestuous cascade of water that inches ever closer, turning the once serene sea into a turbulent crashing mass of stormy grey. The city lights, once so clear, begin to fade, swallowed by the flashes of searing white light and the cloaking darkness of cloud cover.

The distinctive thwap-thwap of a helicopter cuts through the howling of the wind, although it must be suicide to pilot it in this weather.

The wind shakes the washing lines, strung between buildings like a spider’s web strewn between branches.

A white sheet floats past me, like some insubstantial spectre torn from its native roosting place. It spins around the building, as if it were caught in the tornado that took Dorothy to Oz. I have the thought that when the storm ends I will no longer be in monotonous reality, but instead in an intoxicating euphoric dream world.

I turn to look at the tower block beside me, willing for some sense that it is not just I and the distant lone pilot that are trapped in the violent explosion of the weather’s power.

The sky is a swirling expanse, so thick that if I crane my head and search for the ground it is still hidden.

The glass balcony doors slam behind me, locking me out into the electrically charged storm. I spread my arms wide, leaning over the thin rusting railings, as if I were at the front of the titanic. I imagine that if anyone were to see me now it would look as if I were about to take flight.

The wind is no longer howling around the building, it is twisting and turning and screeching around me. It is as if I were underwater, the air churns around me, slamming into my shaking frame. Ethereal tendrils of mist reach out towards me, strangely static in the bedlam vortex that is this war of the elements, disturbingly out of place.

I begin to see shapes in the fog, flashes of figures, a glimpse of a face, vacant eyes betraying the sorrow induced cationic state that holds the face in its stupor. Echoing, hissing voices whisper to me, teasing me to climb onto the shaking railing. My hair whips and flies around me, giving me an insubstantial effervescent halo. The voices screech in delight, I shall join them flying and dancing in the storm!

The wind rushes up, almost lifting me off the iron bar that I am so precariously perched on. But I don’t care. I will willingly embrace the storm and all its violent and tragic ways. I take a deep breath, roll back, and then push myself forwards and up, up into the swirling darkness, strobe flashes of lightning highlighting me against the sky…

And I fall.