I was in the hospital when the cyclone warning was announced. I was in the hospital when Moana was released in theatres and the windows and doors were boarded up by the hospital staff. On the flickering television in the main room, a small woman sat reading the news, a red alert warning for an incoming storm that had already swept our part of the city into ruin. The large double doors of the hospital rattled like a spoon at the topmost shelf of the kitchen. The lights were flickering on and off and a frenzy of blue-dress clad nurses rushed between the rooms. I chewed on a piece of crumbling biscuit—crumbling like the houses outside, crumbling like words around tear-soaked cheeks—and watched the news.

Moana had released in theatres that day. I had two tickets for the animated film in my pocket. Even in the torrents of rain and panic rising in my chest, I wanted to have a normal day—go out to the movies, eat food that will leave me starving my body the next day, find something to complain about that wasn’t our fallen house. In moments of grief for my childhood home, the house that was sitting in a flood of water, I thought of the empty movie theatre and wanted to sit in the velvet seats and forget of my broken home. I was twelve. I only wanted to wish my problems away.

In the main room of the hospital, the television flickered out completely, the woman mid-sentence as the rain outside obscured her words and darkness fell upon the room. I was there for an ophthalmologist appointment, blurry images floated in my sight where people must’ve been, and small potholes of vision bloomed black in my failing sight. At twelve, I had learned that I couldn’t ever drive—with severe arthritis and fibromyalgia sitting fat in my body, taking up my home as theirs, without name a year before at another hospital, in another part of the city. I had continued battles with food, avoiding mealtimes and drinking so much water every day my stomach felt like it was made of liquid, floating between the organs, untethered. I didn’t know then that I would spend years with a psychiatrist attempting to recover from an eating disorder that started when I was twelve. I didn’t know then that I had any problem with food at all. I had accepted parts of my future to be altered, but not as much as it was beginning to be.

As darkness fell upon the room and the large spots of blurry vision turned into inscrutable characters of people in the room, the rain continued to pour down. The sky was a grayed wound, seeping blood across the ground. The sky was a destroyed graveyard of darkness, the rain the fallen gravestones. The graveyard stretched beyond my sight. It ached in my hollow of my vision. The sunlight from hours ago became a distant memory. I left the hospital that day without seeing the doctor at all.

On the streets, the rain fell upon concrete in renewed fury. Every moment was gray and brown, a sepia-coated photograph greyed with time. Blurry people floated into my vision as bodies took cover under the bus station and tall buildings. Hands over their heads. Under umbrellas. In raincoats. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I stood in the street, my body thoroughly soaked through with water.

Vehicles left toward their destination in a hurry. We couldn’t find any vehicle to take us home and had to walk back home in the rain. My body ached, every muscle a bruise in my body, brown as my skin. My joints burned as I walked. Every nerve set on fire, I continued toward home as cars rushed about, people running in all directions. Trees swayed, threatening to fall upon the moving bodies. Every moment was a blurry picture, an old black-and-white movie of its own.

During times of distress, I thought of myself as a character in a book. A book that will soon end. A book that could be read as any other book, and closed and kept back in its shelf. A book that was as drenched in floodwater as I was. As the pages flipped, I grew exhausted but as a character, hope still bloomed in my chest. As a character, I could play my part, and everything would be alright. As a character, when the book ends, I wouldn’t have to die.

In the house, shoes floated toward me in rising ankle-deep water. Books, papers, clothes, and utensils floated in the water, hitting my foot as I walked into the water swept house. In the house, a darkness prevailed as fear settled into my bones. We had survived two floods before, but every time the dread and shock of an uprooted life came crashing into my body and ached in my weakened bones. In the house, the house I’d lived in since I was five, memories were etched in every brick—fighting for snacks with my sister, dinners on the balcony, the scent of chillis and cooked potatoes seeping into the rest of the house from the mouth of the kitchen, reading books in a quiet room when no-one’s home—moments broken in half and resurrected in my mind as they floated in the murky water. Our neighbors had already locked their houses and left the city. Our houseowner had left the city and stopped returning our calls. The oppressive humidity of the rain continued as our drenched bodies stood in the water and contemplated our options.

The mouth of the house yawned, water swept deeper into the house and pooled at different corners. The rooms were cavernous pits of sinking books and clothes, the wardrobe hung open with broken joints, the clothes fallen apart in a pile in the floodwater. The desk in my room was deep in water, its legs creaking. The bookcase sat with an army of books by its side on the floor, each sinking book fighting a battle with the water. The kitchen was a dark pit of clanging utensils, each one hitting the other as they swam in the water. In the living room, I stood staring at the wreckage of the house, my body still weak from walking home from the hospital. My joints ached, my skin was damp—cold and crumbling as hospital biscuits—and I was still as the trunk of a fallen tree.

In those fear-stained moments, I looked at the sky through the glass panes of the living room window and saw the thick pour of rain splash onto concrete. Each droplet sharp as a blade, the rain continued its torrent upon the city. In the news, people had already begun dying due to the floods. In the city, things were ripped from houses and thrown to the water. The houses sat empty of life, of memories removed from the walls, and left to rot in the flood. The sunlight had died hours before and despite it being noon, it felt like the night was already upon us. There was no respite from the rain.

We left too, soon, for a time. My cousins lived outside the city in a place unaffected by the cyclone and we left for their house. It was a house close to the mountains, in an area rarely affected by floods, tucked away from the city. News of people dying during dialysis, and in the operation rooms floated into the city. News of people dying due to the exposed wires on the ground seeped into the water and reached us. There was a fear of dying etched onto every face we passed by. There was the storm too, awaiting our death.

The water had reached our knees by the time we left the house, locked and swept away by water. My bare feet ached as stones plunged deep into the space between my toes. My skin torn, blood rushed out in small intervals as I walked. The water sipped at the small rivulets of blood that seeped out, seeking out the ache, amplifying it like sound in a theatre. Toward the end of our street, the water had risen to a higher level. My father’s body submerged in water up to his hips as my mother’s body barely peeked out the rising water. My own body was covered to my chest in water. Old newspapers and books floated toward me from an abandoned shop. Charred pieces of food swept into the water. I stepped on the coarse wet sand piled on the pavements, and a rock stuck to the soles of my feet as I walked. A construction site—a half-constructed apartment building, wires and ropes hung upon the metal rods of its body, bricks scattered about the ground, sand piled atop pavements—stood drenched in the rain. The darkness obscured the belongings of the people in the city as they left everything behind for the chance of safety.

We walked. Between the electric poles and the large, drenched houses, our bodies were small sinking dots. In the darkness, we were the stars reaching for the moon. The moon and stars had disappeared from the sky and a blue-black bruise settled on the sky in their absence. The water was cold, wetness seeping into my clothes, the color draining from my eyes as everything turned into small moving dark spots. Voices travelled through the water, people calling to each other, words that came out as hiccups and coughs. Disorder was settling into the bones of the city as limbs thrashed in the water. A father held his infant daughter above his head, her body wrapped around his neck as he walked. I watched as the child wailed in the dark, reaching for her mother’s hand.

I wondered how long it would take for me to die if I stepped on an exposed wire. I wondered how long it would take for the wind to knock a tree onto my weak flailing body. I wondered how long I would be alive if I sunk into the water and never rose back up. The sun sinking between the clouds, never rising again. Back then, it felt like the sun would never rise.

I had just begun wearing pants every day in place of the dresses my sister forced me into. I had just begun considering accepting my gender. In the water, all of that faded away and I was just a person hoping to survive the storm. In the water, I was nothing more than a human that could sink in and fall apart. My joints ached as I walked, my body was a torn wound in place of a being, and I had stitched it together to keep it alive. At four, I knew I was trans but refused to accept it. At twelve, I still fought it, but I was getting tired. I was tired of the ‘F’ in all my legal documents. I was tired of the dresses, the long hair, the fear of being found out. In the water, I only worried about living long enough to tell my story.

My body was a shattered glass house. It was the remnants of a broken vase of hope built into a fragile home, and I kept it in a safe for I didn’t want it to shatter again. Being trans—accepting it—meant I had to shatter the safety of the torn glass house. I had to open the wound and let people see it. In moments of scattered hope, I thought it was possible, but most times, I avoided anything related to transness to shield myself from rejection. I was from a conservative family, studying in a girl’s school. Where would I be if the glass house shattered?

My body was the wound I dressed every day, hoping it would heal itself. Within that wound was my identity, my body, and the mirror of my self as I saw it. I had spent my entire life hoping for a different body. I had spent hours agonizing over every curve of my body in the mirror that was now shattered, pieces of it floating in the murky water, and I couldn’t live with what I was for years. My body was an uncomfortable itch. A bruise to be fixed. Never loved.

In my relative’s house, I was a completely healthy girl. They didn’t know of the sickness festering in my body. They didn’t know I was boy. I liked to keep it that way. I valued the safety of the glass house. I valued the hope it provided me with, a future I could live my entire life dreaming of. I spent my days thinking of the future where I could live as myself. Even during the storm, I knew that future awaited me. In my relative’s house, I wouldn’t be alive if the truth came out, so my mouth remained shut at all times and I allowed myself to survive.

In the news, several people had died that night. In hospitals, cars, roads, in their own houses. Safety wasn’t the same for everyone. Many people lost their lives. Lifeboats carried starving bodies out of the water. Helicopters threw food packets onto balconies of the houses in the city. The torrent of the rain continued in the city, but outside the city, outside my cousin’s house, the sun rose high above the sky and splattered across the glass windows. The sun sat on the sky and spread its arms across the entire town in a sweep of light. The darkness of the rain clouds had dissipated from my vision, light poured into the blurry spots, and I was swathed in the sunlight. People seeped back into my vision. Cats and dogs walked on dry land. When my bare foot touched the dry ground of their town, I felt like I wasn’t in the same planet anymore.

When the public transportation resumed work, my family and I boarded the first bus back to the wet weeping city. The city was in ruin. Large buses carried bodies back home as the people silently watched rain dapple the wet ground. Some parts of the city was still submerged in water. Schools and offices were closed. The winter was terrifying. Darkness loomed in the sky during the hours of the day, and as the bus made its way deeper into the city, the less certain I was of my future.

From the bus, I watched people rescue each other. I watched silent bodies raise their hands and hold onto each other. Large groups of people cleaned their streets without waiting for help to arrive. A few small shops had opened their windows and began selling essential items through the window. People rebuilt their own city as the world resumed its clock and the light swept back into the sky.

Hours later we were back home, the rain had ceased its anger upon the clouds and sunlight seeped in between long intervals in the gray overcast sky. Fallen trees littered every street. A large tree in front of our house had fallen onto the street, its roots hanging out in large chunks of soil. The trunk of the tree split in half, leaves scattered across the ground. Soil laid pressed to the streets in different spots, footsteps squelching on the wet ground as people returned to their flooded homes.

Our house was grey and peeling. The bright yellow paint outside had whittled down into a greyish white. The white paint on the inside of the house peeled back to reveal chunks of grey cement. Floodwater still sat in the house. Damaged electrical appliances floated in the water. Drenched books and school assignments sat in the murky liquid. Wet clothes tore when fingers touched them. In the house, there was no light or respite from the flood. There was no hope of moving past this quickly. Everything was in ruin.

Food was scarce. Grocery stores and restaurants boarded up to save the little left of the buildings from the rain. The hotel rooms all taken up by failing bodies hoping for some respite from the rain. The streets were littered with paper—old newspapers and books torn to shreds, pages from school assignments, water soaked through sheets to create a thick mulch of grey—and people in green uniforms appeared with large blue bins, picking up paper and tossing it into garbage bags. I watched large whirring machines come to life and sweep the remaining water away, leaving the streets damp. The sunlight was barely warm, winter bore into my bones as the clouds moved lazily in the line of my blurry sight.

Amma cleaned the house and threw away large bags of clothes and books. I sat in my room and counted the books that had managed to stay dry despite the flood and arranged them on the highest shelf of the bookcase. The bed and blankets were soaked through and much of the furniture were drenched and brittle. So much of the house had to be removed, it felt like a new home by the end of the day.

That night, we slept on the floor with a pile of salvaged wet laundry in a bag. I had changed into a new pair of damp clothes, an ill-fitting pair of trousers and shirt. The clothes were tight and old, torn at the seams, and we laid on the damp floor after a quiet dinner of bread and jam. Amma couldn’t cook with what was left of the kitchen—a sickly wound in place of the kitchen she had spent years in, utensils and grocery gone, most electrical appliances thrown away—and the phones didn’t get signal yet. The rooms were still dark, the oppressive humidity choking my chest, and a large blue-black bruise bloomed across the sky, its long arms obscuring any view of the moon. The world became dark, and I found solace in the small flicker of a lone star from the glass window. Its silver body sat fat on the sky, bright as a burst firecracker, silent as the night. And as I fell asleep, the wound of my body became a small scar of moments, it became the star I saw on the sky, lone and twinkling. It became something to be loved.