Houston has a rotten climate: it’s deathly hot in the summer, cold enough to keep me under the covers in the winter, and a completely random rainfall schedule. Sometimes we don’t get any rain for months and months.

And of course, sometimes it hits so hard it feels like a category five hurricane is going through. That was what happened yesterday at two o’clock in the morning.

I had been dreaming and sleeping comfortably when suddenly I was waken by an explosion. A second one quickly followed. It felt like I was caught in a war zone, with bombs exploding around me.

For a moment, I was tempted to run up to my window and brush away the curtain and blinds just to take a look and remind myself it wasn’t a war zone. But then the rhythm of the rainfall began, and I relaxed.

Bad idea.

There was a giant flash of light inside my room, even with the blinds closed, and it seemed like the sun had decided to move into my room. I could see every single poster on my walls and I saw my homework laying on my table clearly, from the title at the top to my answers scrawled into the blanks.

Why wasn’t it in my backpack? I thought to myself, but before I could finish my thought, the room was plunged into darkness again. And just before I remembered that thunder always came along with lighting, thunder attacked.

It was the world’s biggest bomb dropped into our backyard: a huge explosion blasted in. The windows in my room rumbled as if shrapnel were bouncing off of it, and I feared the glass would shatter. I looked at my clock, just sure it would turn off and the house would be plunged into a power outage.

Nothing happened. The clock stayed on. I watched the colon inside the screen flash back and forth. 2:34… 2:34… 2:34… 2:35… I got drowsy again. I patted my pillow and settled down to continue sleeping. The storm had left.

I was wrong. The storm hadn’t left. With another eye-searing flash, a deafening roar nearly knocked me out of the bed. then everything was quiet. All I could hear was the pitter-patter of the raindrops as they fell.

I might as well get used to it, I thought to myself. By the looks of it, it would be going on for a while. I laid back in my bed and watched the lights flash against my wall. They almost looked like flashing strobe lights if I thought hard enough.

I nodded off back to sleep.