Loud Noise in Sky Over Toronto (speaking of imagination) by Danielle Younge-Ullman

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The other night, just as I was drifting along in the first stage of sleep, I was jolted awake by a tremendous noise. It sounded like the surface of the earth was being scraped off by a giant shovel or plow, or ripped open by something I couldn't even conceive of.

I clutched at my chest, ran to the window, hyperventilated.

I went to my computer and googled "loud noise in sky over Toronto" but didn't find anything.

Then I had to bite my lip because I was starting to cry.

I was quite sure the world was ending, either from a natural catastrophe or nuclear war, and I wanted to wake up everyone in the house, including (and especially) my two-year-old, and start running, or moving everything to the basement. We were staying overnight at my parent's house and I put my hand out for the phone. My husband was a thirty-minute drive away and if I called him right now he might still have a chance to make it to us. If not...well, I wouldn't go there, he would make it.

I thought through what we would do-whether we would manage to grow our own food, if we would be sick, where we would get the seeds to grow the food, what would happen to my little dog, my family, my friends.

I sat in the dark, just listening and trying to breathe. It was at least fifteen minutes before I was able to calm myself and another three hours before I could get to sleep.

And the noise I heard?

The noise I heard was thunder.

I knew it was thunder all along...sort of. It was raining and we'd had storms all day. But I am an anxious person with an imagination that leaps to the worst, most dramatic scenario and insists on spinning through all the possible consequences and permutations. I didn't realize until my mid-twenties that this isn't quite "normal"-that most other people don't walk around with a chorus of Cassandras in their heads, sure that every event leads to disaster.

And that, dear readers, is part of the complicated answer to "is it autobiographical" regarding my book, Falling Under. There isn't a single autobiographical thing in the plot but...my protagonist is so riddled with fear and anxiety, she is nearly paralyzed. The roots of her fears are different from mine and she is a thousand times more neurotic and emotionally precarious (I appear perfectly normal while she is barely able to leave her house) but we share this one essential thing-a surety, in the lonely dark of the night, that thunder is not thunder, but the end of the world.

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Danielle Younge-Ullman, Falling Under, Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, relationships, Penguin Books, books, Plume