Last night’s lightning culled memories, dormant a while now, of my fear of the dark, though it wasn’t the complete dark that terrified me but the thick weight of an unseen presence, the dark against the dark, illuminated suddenly (as in movies) by the shake and explosion of a torrential lightning storm. Except last night’s downpour was one I’ve rarely experienced, it being a tropical storm of the Equator and not the Southwestern desert. Rain fell as if off the end of a river, slammed the metal-covered walkway beneath the apartment window, and I imagined that false sense of shelter creased and folded. Wind threw rain against the window as if to shatter it. I was groggy, much too stuck in dreamland to get up and, I don’t know what, hide or sit on the couch in the front room? I worried about the laundry I’d just washed, left piled on the window seat. I’d have to dry it again, carefully pick out glass bits. Still, I did nothing, only listened through my dreams to the hard blasts cracking the night. The rainy season, it seemed, was early in Singapore, though I’d need to Google it to be completely sure.