Burned

I'm not a fucking poet. That's not what I'm here for. If you're looking for prose as long and flowy as, well, when someone's hair is long and flowy - look for it elsewhere. I'm here for one reason: to tell a story. My story. And that story begins with fire.

First of all, if you've ever stood at the edge of the ocean (especially at night when it meets the sky and seems to stretch on into infinite blackness) and thought, "Fuck, I'm insignificant," then you'll know how I was feeling as I watched my apartment burn down. It's almost the exact same feeling, but emptier. All my shit, gone. Any record of my adult life, destroyed. Just like that.

Fire doesn't care about my debate trophy from the ninth grade, stuffed into a box under my bed. Fire doesn't care about all the oddballs I had to wade through at the Walmart to pick up the 8x10" photos I got printed. Fire doesn't care that picture frames are kind of pricier than you would expect; like, even though you have a Hobby Lobby gift card, the price of the frame with the gift card is still more expensive than if you just got the damn thing at Walmart, too. But I wanted a nicer frame, not one of those cheap-looking ones, so my living room would look like all the ones I saved on Pinterest... and on and on. These are the thoughts that were going through my head.

But I shop at Walmart, so does that make me one of the oddballs? And I'm going to have to go back there a lot - Lord knows I can't afford to replace all this furniture at the fucking Pottery Barn. I get their magazines in the mail, but it's not like I'm delusional enough to think I can shop there.

"Ma'am, do you have anywhere you can go tonight?" asked one of the firefighters. As if he was going to make up a couch for me at his place if I said no.

"Sure," I mumbled, slinging my backpack over my shoulder and picking up the little pear tree I planted when I first moved here. In the heat of the moment, you grab the dumbest things. How is a tree in a pot going to help me start my entire life over? Sure, I'll be getting an adequate amount of Vitamin C, but where am I going to live?

I got all the way to my car, hefting the plant onto my hip like a toddler in order to open the door, before I realized I didn't have my car keys. I was always losing them (it wasn't like I could be bothered to hang them on the key hook next to the door every time) so naturally I didn't see them on the way out.

I turned around and walked back to the fireman. "Do you think I could get a ride, or should I just call an Uber?"

~

When I knocked on my parents' door, the house was entirely dark. No one answered at first. I set the pear tree down on the porch. Then I took a deep breath and called my mom, something I'd been avoiding. Everybody knows you can't just call your mom in the middle of the night: she'll assume it's an emergency and freak out. But in my case, I guess, it kind of was an emergency.

She picked up on the second ring. "Claire, what's going on? Are you okay? Do you need a ride home from the bars?" She always said "the bars" as if I was some 65 year-old alcoholic who spent my nights wasting away in the corner of some old dive, drowning my sorrows in shitty whiskey.

"No mom, I don't need you to pick me up," I said curtly. "I just need you to let me in. I'm outside your house."

"What - why?" she hissed. I could hear her rolling out of bed. I imagined her slipping on her grandma-style house slippers that she got herself for Christmas (but put my dad's name on the "from" tag). She shuffled around a bit. "Is this like that time Chevy Matthis broke your heart in college and you had to come stay with us for a few days?"

Ah, Chevy. I'd forgotten all about him, but luckily for me, mothers never forget. I shook my head even though she couldn't see me. I was already exasperated. "No mom, it's not like that. It's like my apartment caught on fire and all my shit got burned to ash."

"WHAT?" I heard my mom shout, not over the phone, but from behind the front door. It flew up. "Oh my God." Her face was pale, and she was indeed wearing her slippers. She clutched at her robe and wrapped and arm around me, dragging me inside. "Are you serious? Baby, are you okay? What happened? Why didn't you call sooner?" She shut and re-locked the front door. "What happened?!" she demanded with increasing hysteria. She was still babbling when my father appeared at the top of the stairs.

"Lynn, what's going - Claire?"

Half asleep, he was still mumbling in surprise when my mom shouted, "Her apartment caught fire!"

He met us at the bottom of the stairs, hands in his pajama pants, and tried for a smile. "Like, 'you overcooked your dinner' fire? Or like, 'you barely made it out alive' fire?"

"The second one." I grimaced. Saying it out loud made it feel so permanent.

"Oh my God," my mom said again. "Did you go to the hospital? We have to take you to the hospital! Did you inhale smoke? Luke, can't she die from smoke inhalation? Do you feel dizzy?"

I did a little, after listening to her. I looked at my dad. He shrugged, but worry was clearly wringing out his features. "Did you inhale any smoke?" he asked.

"Uh, I don't think so."

"Then she doesn't need to go to the hospital," he told my mom matter-of-factly. "I'm sure there were medics and everything who already checked her over. Did the medics already check you over?

I nodded. I had been in such shock that it was all a blur.

He looked at my mom, who was currently hyperventilating while holding onto me for dear life, as if the fire might come back to finish the job. "Lynn, take some deep breaths." He closed the distance between us in one big step, and then he had his arms around us both, squeezing us tight to his chest. The sudden act of intimacy surprised me, and before I knew it, hot tears were welling up in my eyes.

"I lost all my stuff," I croaked pathetically.

"You're the only stuff that matters," my dad said into my hair. "I'm just glad your safe, sweetie. Everything else we can figure out."

That really broke me down, and the rest of the night was just a mess of crying, and going over everything that had happened, and bringing my pear tree inside to get some rest. At that time, I was just grateful to be alive and with my family. I had no idea that it was all their fault.