Taking on Water

The following was originally written on Thursday, July 15th at 4am using old school pen and paper.

* BANG*BANG*BANG*

It's not thunder. If I hadn't been lying awake for the last couple of hours listening to the storm, I might have been unsure in a half-asleep state. What time is it? 3:30am. So who exactly is knocking at my door?

Throwing my legs over the side of the bed I stand up. What the... My feet are wet. This, it would seem, is because my floor is wet. Flip on the light. Correction, my floor is not wet. It's flooded. I open the door to a man in a rain jacket speaking in Spanish. I assure him I speak very little. He asks me to check the kitchen - it's safe from the water due to a small step up from the main room. I check the bathroom, finding deeper water since it's a step down from the main room. Poor shower drain, more than just a little overwhelmed by all of this. I check the closet, which is flush with the main room but appears to be dry. So I live on a slant? Okay then. The man in the rain jacket assures me it will all be cleaned tomorrow and he sloshes away. If my room has taken on water, then the courtyards are ankle deep like my bathroom.

My knapsack is on the floor! With my wallet inside it. Shoot.

The contents are emptied in the kitchen, my new safe zone. Thankfully my laptop wasn't in it's case in my knapsack, but on my desk which I had checked a few hours earlier to make sure rain from the window couldn't reach it.

Better double check it. Wait - how is there water on the desk, on and beside my laptop?! -Insert expletive-

Apparently I forgot to check if my ceiling was leaking with water seeping down the wall and onto my desk. Silly me. I dry off the outside of my computer, and release a breath I didn't know I had been holding. The water doesn't appear to have made it inside. Wrapped in a plastic bag it goes on a shelf in my closet. Along with all my other electronics. Drawers are emptied, items on low lying shelves are relocated to higher ground. Wet items are set out to dry. It sounds like the raining is stopping, but I'm in no position to be taking any chances. Guess that's all I can do tonight, time to go back to trying to sleep. Except I realize my bed and sheets are damp now. Searching the ceiling for the guilty culprit, I recall how my initial reaction to my knapsack being on the floor was to pull it up onto my bed. Real smart, brainiac. Now I get half a bed and no sheets. That should for sure resolve my failed attempts to sleep tonight. So I dry my feet and settle in, watching the light from my lamp reflecting off the water and onto my walls. How soothing...