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On the thirtieth of August 2017, I turned 13. I had been living on St. Thomas, in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), for a year and eleven days. Little did I know that 6 days later, my life was going to turn topsy turvy. The weekend of the 2nd of September, I celebrated my birthday by going to camp in the Eco Tents at Cinnamon Bay on the island of St. John. My friends from Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Zara and Dominique, came over to join four of my new friends from the USVI. We had a fabulous weekend filled with laughter, fun, friendship, jumping in the waves and cupcakes. That was the last time I can remember being happy and carefree. To make the weekend longer, our school (Virgin Islands Montessori School and International Academy) gave us Tuesday off because of a Category Three hurricane hurtling towards us. Sunday, my mother and I took Zara and Dominique back to Virgin Gorda and stayed the night at Zara’s. We have many connections on Virgin Gorda because my dad owns a family home there that had been in the family for 3 generations. Years ago, my grandad had fallen in love with the island and had bought a house. Once he became too old, he felt that he couldn’t live there any longer because of health care limitations, so he and my grandmother retired in France. The house fell in a state of disrepair. My dad, mom and I moved there and my parents intended on renovating it before I had to start school. But on “island time,” four years was equivalent to ten years. I grew up on Virgin Gorda, attended a local school and Zara and Dominique became my best friends. After completing 6th grade, my family moved to St. Thomas because that was where my mother worked. On Monday morning, my mom and I checked the Virgin Gorda house to make sure it was “Irma ready.” Hurricane Irma had already progressed to a Category four hurricane and was aiming straight towards us. This was strange because in the twelve years we had been living in the islands, we had only once experienced a hurricane. Our house, Downside, was ready and someone was due to pick up Coco (our cat) that afternoon, to wait out the hurricane with him somewhere else. Then, we rushed to the dock and caught the last boat to St.Thomas, where the ports close 24 hours before the arrival of a storm. On Tuesday, September 5th, Irma progressed to a Category five monster. Throughout the day, she went from 145 mph to 185 mph, an astonishingly high speed wind. The media was calling her “the strongest and possibly most impactful hurricane in history.” I was getting anxious and had a headache, so I spent the majority of the day in bed, while my dad put up the hurricane shutters. My mother returned from work early and told me that she and I would have to wait Irma out in the hospital because she had a night shift and it would be safer for me there. As the sun sank behind the sea, it was the last day that light would hit St.Thomas in the same way. On Wednesday morning, I arose early because curfew started at five. My mom and I drove to the hospital at about four thirty. The wind had started to pick up and the sky showed signs of rain. In the car, we discussed the apocalyptical feel of it all. It was eerie, driving on St.Thomas, when the whole island seemed to be holding its breath. Inside the hospital, everything was calm, but I on the other hand, was not. My stomach had started to tie itself up in a complicated and twisted knot. I watched murder movies to pass the time and keep my mind off the incoming storm, but it really didn’t help the ambiance. Every half hour, I was going to the see through balcony door, to check what was going on outside. By eight o’clock the heavens had opened and the wind was swirling angrily. At ten, I saw the roof of a gas station across the road peel off like the way one peels the skin off an orange. The wind was streaming by so quickly, I wondered how it could go any faster. The eye would pass between two and four. In between eleven and two o’clock, the palm trees turned from tropical green to burnt. They looked brown and all their leaves were tossed on the ground. Branches flew across the parking lot along with other debris that had turned into missiles. How it really looked and how it tore through my feelings is impossible to describe, unless you were there to see it with me. Words don’t suffice to explain my gut feeling or explain the real devastation and destruction that was going on outside. It was inexplicable. At two o’clock, things miraculously got worse. If someone had taped a piece of gray paper in front of the door, no one in the pharmacy would have been any the wiser. The five storey hospital was shaking violently, threatening to collapse in at any moment. Then, the fourth floor windows flew out like birds being released from a cage. The Medical Floor was gone. The patients were carried down the stairwells on their mattresses and placed on the floor in the Labour and Delivery Unit. It must have been a truly haunting thing to have seen. There was flooding everywhere. Meanwhile, back in the pharmacy, water came in from underneath the door. Bits of sheetrock were giving in and letting down tons of water onto the pharmacy floor. The technicians were mopping the floor viciously and one could smell burning electricity, as there was water flooding through electric panels, ripping wires apart. We watched the storm until we could watch no more and tossed and turned in our hospital beds. All over the island, roofs were blowing off cement houses, walls were caving in, people were being traumatized, and windows were being ripped out of their frames. We heard stories of people who waited the hurricane out with their families and pets in their closets or bathtubs. I awoke to more wind and rain. I could see telephone poles that had cracked in half, and more dark clouds coming. Then, I started to read a book about two individuals stuck in hell, to make myself feel better, and grateful for my life. Finally, the weather started to clear up, so my mom drove to our house to check on my father. She tried to drive back, quickly. This was unsuccessful, as there were so many people on the road that it took her three hours to drive on a road that normally took 30 minutes. Over the next two days, I saw destruction, carnage, and devastation. Trees with no leaves, houses that one could see, that had always been hidden by bush. You could observe the telephone poles that had cracked in half, leaving cables scattered everywhere. You could stare straight through houses, and other buildings. Lots of buildings had been flattened, most flooded, and tons destroyed. In some places, you could see metal poles and roofs bent in half, or twisted in strange shapes lying on the road. After much time, one became depressingly immune to it. I walked around for a week, with very little emotion before I had a mental breakdown. For that week, it was as if my mind had been wiped clean. I was shell shocked. There was an expensive yellow house, two doors down from our house. It had just been finished and had huge glass windows facing Puerto Rico. A caretaker had been looking after it during the hurricane. At some point in time, he heard a cracking noise. He ran outside and into his car, just to see the roof fly off the house seconds later. My dad found him, traumatised, and still in the car the next morning. He walked around for days with a lost, lifeless expression on his face. He had been seconds away from losing his life. For days, one could see cushions, tiles, and furniture scattered through our neighborhood. A house once worth a million dollars was now just an empty shell. Somewhere along the way, Cellular Hill became popular. We live on a hill and on a small point of that hill, you could receive one or two bars of signal. Cell service, of course, was now considered a luxury, as it was rare and would most likely be down for months, as all the poles were down. Soon, word spread and tons of people were piled on this miniscule point. Everyone was sharing stories and telling others news and gossip. There were some truly terrible stories. We overheard a man saying that all he had were the clothes on his body. There was another tale about a man that had three daughters and each one’s bedroom was painted a different colour. When their roof went, people started calling it, “The Rainbow House.” Stories like these cracked my heart into small pieces. Some of the hot topics on Cellular Hill were looting and the British Virgin Islands. The BVI was rumoured to have been hit by a wrecking ball. No matter how hard the United States Virgin Islands had been hit, the BVI was off worse. Some people said that our house was gone without a trace and others claimed that nothing had happened. We would not know for ourselves until we had proof. Then, there was the looting. People who had nothing were breaking into other people’s houses and stealing food. I didn’t consider this honourable, but with no supermarkets open, nobody deserved to starve. Unfortunately, then it started getting out of hand. Individuals were starting to steal money and electronics. Then, you knew that they were thieves and they were being greedy and trying to make money off other people. For all they knew, the things they took were all that the owners had. Then what? It was especially bad in the B.V.I., and within a few days, the place became a crime scene. Still, there were unexpected moments of humour. One day, while driving home, a police car with flashing lights passed the traffic we were sitting in. The St. Thomian police officer spoke through a megaphone. “Keep awn drivin’. Y’all ain’t goin’ to ah funerahl.” That was when everybody in the vehicle burst out in laughter. Of course, then there was the threat of José. Another hurricane, just a few days after Irma, and a Category Four. We didn’t need it. Tons of people had suffered. We didn’t deserve any more punishment. No one did. Most people didn’t bother even taking off their hurricane shutters. We were extremely lucky, because José swung north just before hitting us. Finally, on Monday, we discovered what had happened on Virgin Gorda. A friend had sent us photos and we received them because there were a couple of bars of service at the hospital. Our concrete roof had vanished into thin air. The second floor of our house lay on the driveway. A tornado on the eye wall had ripped through the house. My bedroom, two bathrooms, and a TV room were spared. Ten years of work were gone in two minutes of tornado. That’s when my family cracked. My mother fell apart and I don’t know when her positive, upbeat personality will return. She can’t even escape from the harsh reality of it all, as the hospital needs her; she saves lives every day and our hospital needs her more than ever. My dad is shell shocked about the house on Virgin Gorda. He spent hours with his own dad on the deck. It was his family home, the only thing his parents left him and now it had literally been blown away. He stares into space as if he’s got no purpose, and when he does express feeling, it’s anger. I am afraid for my own parents. Half my school has either left or evacuated. My school itself is badly damaged and many of my teachers are traumatised, while some have lost their homes. I don’t believe school can reopen before October, which means it will have been out of commission for a month. I don’t want to repeat eighth grade. I might go to Guatemala, where we lived for a year, where I could do my studies online, but no one knows for sure. Every day, we see the military. It has gotten normal to hear police sirens frequently and to see military officers driving around in their war like machines. We have started living in a war zone. What happened to our tourist paradise? Within a short period of time, we have lost track of what day it is, what time it is, and who we really are? We truly are lost people. And then there was Maria, which was just a little more than what our easygoing island people could handle…Luckily, the time’s healed us and we’ve gone back to normal...or have we?