There was a night when I was 12 years old where the power went out during a thunderstorm, and for a few minutes, it felt like I was the last person alive.

Not in a bad way. Not in a tragic, apocalyptic way. But in that strange, in-between state where everything is just quiet enough to trick you into believing that you're somewhere else. Somewhere sideways.

I grew up in a small town. You could walk it end to end in under an hour if you didn’t stop to talk to someone. But we always stopped. That’s what small towns are like: the interruptions are the journey.

But that night—no interruptions. Just wind.

I remember sitting on the porch, cross-legged, a flashlight aimed at a book I didn’t end up reading. There was something in the air. Not ominous exactly. More like… an invitation to listen. You know the way the air smells when lightning’s nearby? Like the sky’s charging up for something? That.

I could hear every creak of the trees. Every small shift of a branch. A dog barked in the distance and I actually flinched—not because I was afraid, but because I had forgotten the world still existed outside of me. That’s how deep the quiet was.

Eventually, I looked up at the sky. And the stars—man. You forget how many there are until the power cuts and the world goes dark. That night, it felt like every single one of them was watching me back.

And for whatever reason, sitting there on that porch, I felt okay for the first time in weeks. I was a weird kid. Quiet. Obsessed with books and ghost stories and the feeling that there was something just past the veil of everyday life. That night made me feel like I wasn’t crazy for believing that.

It didn’t last long. The lights came back on. My mom came outside, told me I’d catch a cold. The world went back to being the world. But that one hour? It stuck. It was the kind of hour that lives in your bones.

I’ve chased that feeling ever since.

In stories. In films. In long walks where no one talks. In the hum of quiet cities late at night. In the way music sounds when you’re driving with the windows down and no destination.

That’s probably why I write. Why I create. Why I spend way too much time staring at blank pages, hoping they’ll blink first. I want to trap those moments. Hold them in a jar like fireflies and say: Look. It was real. I was there. Maybe you were too.

Not everything needs to be big. Sometimes the small things—the quiet things—are the ones that matter most.

Update: test