They say when people are struck by lightning, they are irrevocably altered. If they are not left crumpled with burnt and smouldering feet, the experience becomes a story told over and over, a miracle. Perhaps this story is one of those, where I saved Mary, against all odds. In my last moments, how could not have wanted it any other way?  

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/AK55EGAT2QCUWTMx1MWMvnU4mhU6HEAsrw2NVUXW7mv5VRHrHwHwQiMXiXJkKPS.png)


The time before a thunderstorm breaking has a particular smell. This had always been a warning sign, although around me barely anyone would notice. Beyond our sight, lightning had split atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen molecules, combining them with nitric oxide and forming which, with further reactions, forms ozone, arriving before the rain.

On the first occasion I, Henry Watts, was five years old. My botanist father had taken me and my twin sister to search for a elusive soot black moth. We mimicked our father as he lightly stomped with his leather boots across the soggy ground. When he paused to stroke his moustache, so did we fondle our upper lips. When he raised a wing or moss to his monocle, so we peer through an imaginary glass. 'Twins', my mother would say 'both in soul and in body'. 

On this day, however, my tiny self would splinter the consciousness I'd shared a womb with. I heard the rumbles before my father, who was absorbed, he said later, with the rare rabbit moss. The rumbles grew so loud I put my small hands over my ears and yelled for him, who turned just in time to see both me and my sibling struck by lightning. 

I do not remember much, just the squelch of my father's boots and the smell of his wet woolen coat where my face was pressed. When my mother peeled off my sodden clothes, my left arm bore the first of many arborescent erythema, tree-like markings on the skin. My capillaries had ruptured from the electricity, and I was scarred, but I was not dead, like my sister. For months I slept, my head full of sooty moths and rabbit moss and the ghost of my other self, unable to speak. When I awoke, I knew all the names of the plants, mosses, and trees, both common names and Latin, all my father knew and more beside.

At seventeen, a week shy of travelling to London to study Natural Sciences, I was struck again as I rode my horse from the village toward home with the sextant that I had bought with my allowance. My sister rode beside me, a ghost, a lost soul, forever present but never truly there. The wind had been gathering, with thunder grumbling in the near distance and although I had been urging the animal forward we did not make it home in time to take shelter. The air fizzed and sizzled as the lightning struck, and I was crushed under dying animal. I blinked as unworldly spheres floated in the sky across  my field of vision, then the entire galaxy, all of the planets - both discovered and undiscovered, and the transit of Venus both in the past century and the one to come. I saw Neptune, previously only discovered due to perturbations around Venus's orbit, and it's yet undiscovered moons. When they found me, I was half way through a monotonous lullaby of all the stars - Sirius, Canopus, Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega, Capella, Rigel - nonsense for those uninvested in Astronomy, of course. 

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/AJg6UrzDs2TiwiD6BQgQ6UaKCAnniQywYXqdBL8bhUuCV9LMMkiASXBQYBsWXbb.png)

I would forever limp, and I had lost my vision in left eye that would never be regained. The branched lighning which had lit up the entire village that day was perfectly mirrored on my upper chest, sparked up my white throat and burst across my cheek. My sightless eye was now a milky white like the dead planets I had seen reflecting their nearest sun. Despondant, I could not undertake my studies, and in fact, would never go to London as planned. What *point* was there to my studies when I had seen the galaxies? How might I learn anything from the mathemeticians that mapped out the night sky when I had already seen it a hundred years into the future? 

By twenty six, my parents both dead, I lived on a small inheritance in the family manor which overlooked fields and the wild seas. I sketched modest botancial drawings to ease my trembling mind, which still travelled to the skies if I was not careful to keep busy in the garden. I was careful not to reveal what I had seen lest I was committed to the asylum at Broadmoor, and instead would talk to my sister, who kept good company though her form grew fainter with the passing years. Souls so interwined stay close. 

I was careful to avoid the storms, particularly in the warmer months,  where it tattered and frayed the skies.

One cannot, however, avoid fate. 

In the year I turned a lonely thirty, I met my love in a storm, whereby I was momentarily paralysed by both her and the lightning. From my window I saw her walking across the fields, an umbrella protecting her from the rain. Having counted the seconds between thunder and the light, and found myself racing to warn her. A spark flew between us and united us for the short time she had left on earth. Annie and I lived lifetimes in that moment, but she was buried within three days, having died within a minute. How could I explain this union of souls so powerful we recognised each other in an instant? That in that  brief moment, I had seen our wedding night, her rosy cheeks flushed with love? That I had watched our children be born? That I had seen her collect flowers in the meadow every day in summer to put on the sill? That she rubbed my scars with her soft fingers and kissed them so that they faded? Of her eyes which met my own with a shock of recognition and then, as her heart beat a strange irrythymic time as the electricity passed through and stopped her heart, of the love that only souls who have spend all their lifetimes together thus far could know?  Simultaneously, I held her hand on her deathbed with children and grandchildren around us, and in the field, surrounded by blue fire. 

From that horrendous moment I did not care to take shelter when the air changed or the clouds billowed. I was struck another twelve times. I learnt all the languages of Babylon, understood music but would not play it because it reminded me of how Annie breathed beside me in our bed facing the Atlantic, and I saw God, although not in the form recognised by Scripture. My entire body was a cartographer's map of branched trees, some raised and ridged, some faint and fading, some red and ragged. The hair on my head had been singed so many times it refused to grow back. My right hand did not stop shaking and my left did not move at all. I lost the sight in my other eye but I did not need it to see, for I could see everything and know everything. 
It is a wonder to me, the world, and all that is in it. There are more beauties in the world than horrors, I discovered, a small comfort as my consciousness left my body over and over again. Despite this strange card I had been dealt, I came to understand the world as inherently good, because it has to be, being part of an interconnected whole. I accepted my fate, and was grateful for everything just as it was. The skies might grow dark, but the lightning plays across it, beautiful and majestic. 


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/riverflows/AK3ddhZAKg26R6rtA6cKK7LtLK9brmD8bnudPPRuEweGDCvJE9BvqnKcrpGXhfx.png)


The last time I was struck was also the first, in a strange poetry that would have me flying across time and space to save Mary, my sister, my twin soul, who was skipping beside me looking for soot moths with my father. Just like I had moved through the planets or composed opera, lived a lifetime of love with Annie, or moved through the underlands with the bugs of the soil, I accepted the experience as real and true, so real that I wept with the joy of it. With my five year old hand holding hers, I swung her sideways and into a patch of cushiony sphagnum moss, where she gasped with suprise at the insult and then watched me struck by lightening. 

I smiled at her and felt my small heart flutter and burst, and my soul leave to join the planets, the mosses, and the entire universe, including Annie, who was smiling at me like she knew I was coming.  

Mary would not live a life like mine, full of sparks and shudders, but one loved and long.

I knew this, for I had seen it, in the lightning skies. 

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**Images by me and Midjourney.**