The cyclone

This piece is based on a prompt I came across on the incredible writing community called Write The World:

“Point of view (P.O.V.) is the perspective from which a narrative is told. Pick up a novel, and it might be written in first person, using the “I” perspective of the main character.
A novel may also be told in third person, in which the main character is referred to as “he” or “she”.
And then there are the less common P.O.V.s—the collective, and second person, in which the main character is referred to as “you”.

In this prompt, dear writers, write a passage of fiction, employing the second person—“you”—point of view.” (For the full prompt, visit: https://writetheworld.com/groups/1/assignments/936)

Here is my take on the second person:

It is your first time experiencing a cyclone. Your Ma watches three different new channels, all of which declare that the cyclone will hit the coast at a speed of 160 kmph, in an eerily similar cadence. You don’t think much of this. You still haven’t associated the word with the phenomenon. For you, the word is like the sound of too loud television from a neighbour’s home, something you tune out, not heed the warning of. You think this, and immediately think how college for you is kind of the same. How you don’t really know the real world, apart from the fact that it exists. This thought does not settle well with you.

When the cyclone hits, it looses a lot of its power. By the time it reaches you, it is not as destructive as it once was, but it still hasn’t run out, like a villain who gets defeated in the first part of a superhero movie, but is back in the second one with stories of how they conquered defeat.

It feels to you that the cyclone is slowly brainwashing every element of nature and taking revenge for some wrong dealt out to it ages ago. It starts with the wind. You hear the way it seems to beat against the entire house like a too loud, off beat base. You refuse to believe the possibility of what is so destructively insistent in you ear. You think, maybe there are a thousand helicopters in the sky, beating their wings in tandem and sending the dismembered air to beat against your windows. But if that were the case, the trees in front of your apartment wouldn’t have fallen, electricity would still be there, most of the affected regions’ crops wouldn’t have been thrashed to death by the wind.

Next comes water. At first, you enjoy it. The suppleness of your surroundings, the fresh smell of wet earth, the cool raindrops on your face. But then, the rain too becomes a weapon. It terrifies you how something as simple as rain washes away all concepts of day and night with the dark grey clouds that seal off the sky. You help your Ma plug all the openings that can let any water in and tie windows to their bars so they don’t break. You watch as all your attempts turn out to be useless as ultimately the water seeps in through the minuscule space between the wall and the window sill, the floor and the balcony door, until the house feels like every surface was made of soaked clouds.

When finally the cyclone has its revenge and the wind and the water see reason again, you think back to your thought about college. It terrifies you. The fact that the phenomenon is so much bigger than the word. The fact that the real world is really real, not just a fantasy your overthinking brain developed. But then you think that the cyclone was also just a word before you were in the middle of it.