I didn’t know why the storm obsessed me, why I dreaded it as much as people who lived on stilt houses in the Outer Banks. Maybe it was lack of sleep, maybe it was living in a water closet, maybe it was being forced to shower in terror, but I let Hurricane Hugo become a metaphor for my life, and then I let it consume my life. As if its low-pressure system had collided with my high pressure, the storm gathered up all my unhappiness about McGraw and Aunt Ruth and Sidney and the Times and focused it into one tight eye. From morning until night I could think of nothing but Hugo.
