"My name is John Stanton, but most people call me Storm. My sister still calls me Johnny. And more than once, I shouldn't have made it back to shore." That's how this story starts: with a wet radio, a dead compass, and a sky that looked like an iron door slamming shut over Pamlico Sound.
Before the rescue chopper and the wristful of plastic hospital bracelets, there was six-year-old John building kites from grocery bags in a Worcester triple-decker while a box fan roared like a propeller; there was twelve-year-old John in Santa Fe, where the horizon had no edges and the monsoons taught him to count lightning. I ping-ponged between a machinist father on Coral Street and a night-shift nurse mother off Agua Fria. At fifteen, I wired a busted weather vane to a Sega console because I wanted to see wind on the TV. At nineteen, I drove a sun-faded Ford Fairmont across I-40 with a milk crate of cassette tapes and a coffee can full of quarters for pay phones.
At twenty-two, I slipped a badge on at NOAA in Silver Spring and learned that the air itself has scars. At twenty-nine, I became the dawn-face at WCLP 7 in Portland, the guy with the rolled-up sleeves explaining pressure gradients with a marker and a smile. I chased Irene up the Hudson, learned the smell of soggy plaster in Montpelier, and at 3 a.m. ate gas-station blueberry pies with a photographer named Alicia because the newsroom vending machine was locked.
Then came Arthur, a skiff, a rogue wave, and a hush where the world went white. An ICU in Greenville. A rehab room in Providence with a calendar I didn't remember buying. Post-it notes in my own handwriting: Feed the basil. Call Eliza. Your keys are in the blue bowl. A fracture line ran straight through my memories, and pain pills slid in like sugar, softening the edges until they dissolved me.
What followed was a weather map of wreckage: a marriage I couldn't keep warm, a job I pretended to still want, friends who stopped answering, and a pharmaceutical forecast I calibrated by the hour. I tell you about Dr. Kumar's office in Back Cove, the church basement on Oak Street where coffee was bad but people told the truth, and the day a stranger in Boise recognized me by my laugh and said, You're going to be all right. I tell you about the morning I poured a full bottle down the sink and watched it swirl away like a storm cell breaking apart.
Storm and the Forgotten Dreams is not a manual and not a confession; it is a barometer turned inward. It is about the weather inside a person—the fronts that form from love and fear, the pressure that builds when you're always smiling on camera, the quiet after. I tell the stories of the people who steadied me: Maya with the orange bike helmet, Diego who always brought grapes to group because donuts felt like lying, my mother asleep in her scrubs on our couch beneath a map of New Mexico. I tell about the peace that arrived like fog—slow, complete—when I finally sat still.
I return to Santa Fe's open sky, to Portland's gulls and granite, to a backyard station I built with a secondhand anemometer and a homemade Stevenson screen. I teach teenagers how to read a cloud, call my father on Fridays, and let the dog wake me before dawn. This is a weather report for anyone who has learned to predict their own storms, and for anyone who hasn't yet believed they can. It's unvarnished and sometimes funny, because life is both. The air has scars, yes—but scars tell you which way the wind once blew, and how you found your way home.
