November 6, 2021
I fell asleep with my window open last night and woke in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. My clever brain told me that the smell was the familiar scent of cigar smoke, probably coming from my neighbor’s balcony or someone smoking on their front stoop. My triggered heart told my clever brain to shut the hell up, and I swiftly ran down the stairs in my underwear to convince myself that my house was not on fire. Once I assessed the nothing-ness in my home, I crawled back into bed and had vivid dreams about rounding the corner of the stairway to my kitchen to find the stove engulfed in flames.
I experienced a small fire in my apartment in 2020. I was moving to a new apartment down the hall, and had a plastic container neatly packed to the brim with all of my nicest cookware sitting on my stove. As I was carrying some boxes down the hall to my new crib, I must have hit one of the stovetop knobs with my elbow. I went down the hall, unloaded the boxes, and returned to the old apartment for another load, only to see smoke filling the hallway. My stomach dropped and I ran into my apartment to see my stove in flames. I ran inside to rescue Maudie and searched for her for a few moments before I remembered that I had boarded her safely at PetSmart for the weekend. Then I ran through the tiny hallway that was the kitchen of my studio apartment, and melted plastic from my neatly-packed-and-now-destroyed-by-flames plastic container splashed onto my leg and my arm as I exited. As the fire alarm went off and I heard fire trucks arrive outside of my now-evacuated 18-story apartment building, I sat in the lobby nearly hyperventilating, wondering if my mistake had injured anyone…or worse.
I took my first ambulance ride that day, got treated for some minor second degree burns, and hitched a ride with the fire marshal back to my apartment, which he assured me was “not in that bad of shape”. When I followed him into apartment 224, it dawned on me that only a very small percentage of my belongings were damaged by my tiny fire – but nearly everything I owned was drenched in water by the sprinkler system. The next two days were a marathon of sorting through my wet belongings to determine what could be salvaged and what should be thrown away. I was very lucky that my parents were already on their way to Arlington to help me move that weekend, and they arrived early in the evening to find their pitiful baby girl in a covid-19 mask with soot all over her face, sticky from sweat and dirt from the clean-up effort, and too stressed and overwhelmed to cry (I did later, a lot). When they arrived, I realized I hadn’t taken a sip of water, looked in the mirror or gone to the bathroom in about 8 hours – as if the only thing that mattered in life that day was the cleanup process/punishment I deserved for a careless mistake.
Looking back, I know this was a good experience. It was good that I didn’t get hurt more than I did, it was good that no one else in my building was injured, and it was good that Maudie was not home at the time. It was good that I had renter’s insurance to cover all of the damage, not only to my own belongings, but to the building (including flood damage to my neighbor’s apartment and the OrangeTheory on the first floor). It was good that my family was there to help me. It was good that I had a place to stay that night (and every night after).
This is one of those life experiences that I would like to forget, but I’ll still be a good sport and laugh about it with friends. My boyfriend’s favorite nicknames for me, “Smokey” and “Sweet Lil Half Smoke” are inspired by this incident (which I got to recount to him with pink cheeks during our first date). When I met his parents for the first time, he made sure to bring it up so I could tell them my embarrassing tale as well. It’s all in good fun, and I’m blessed that it is a story that can be told with a light heart and met with laughter, when it easily could have been a tragedy. I am very lucky.
Despite the laughable circumstances, I’m still a little traumatized by the whole experience. When I moved into my house and cooked my first meal here, the sensitive smoke detector in my new kitchen went off over and over again – this thing was triggered by steam from asparagus, for Pete’s sake. Each time the beeping started, I nearly jumped out of my skin and felt seized with panic. Before the evening was over, I had ordered a new, less false-positive prone smoke detector because my little heart couldn’t take all the false alarms. I rarely leave the house without feeling the nagging sensation of having left something plugged in or turned on at home – Is my hair straightener on? Did I turn the oven off? Is that lamp in my office still switched on?
We have all experienced some form of trauma in our lives. I don’t pretend my trauma holds a candle to things that others have faced- I try to keep that in perspective. I just left a party for a five-year-old who finished his last chemotherapy treatment this week- his parents know something about trauma. Here I am, with my trauma amounting to little more than a funny story I can tell at parties paired with some paranoia and fear of flames- I definitely don’t want to come across as whiny or self-important, because I’ve lived a really privileged life. But even I can understand how some things that happen to us stay with us and impact us in ways we never expect. I’ve experienced some other types of trauma that didn’t involve fire, mostly involving mental abuse and infidelity in romantic relationships of my past. And just as I feel paranoia about fire safety, I also feel paranoia about safety in relationships of all kinds. I’ve had trauma responses to innocent circumstances and found myself projecting insecurities from past trauma onto people that I should and DO trust. I don’t need to go into detail here, but it’s something that I’m aware that I struggle with.
I don’t know why I’m writing this – I just had my panic moment last night, and my bad dream to follow, and had a moment of joy this afternoon when I found myself cooking my dinner on the stove. It’s such a small thing that was like breathing before my fire in 2020, but now I sometimes marvel at my own nerve when I stand in front of the flame. Just as trusting people in romantic relationships and opening myself up to love used to be as easy as breathing before my trust was compromised. Yet, I still stand in front of that flame and open myself up to love again and again. I think maybe this is just a tiny example of grit from my life, and I’m not exactly moving mountains or doing anything remarkable here – but it feels like a small drop in the strength-bucket to say that I got burned and still stand in front of the flame. I hope that you can look at the traumas that you carry around with you, recognize how they affect you in your present, but can also acknowledge all of those moments when you bravely stand in front of the flame anyway. That’s true grit, and I think you should give yourself a little credit for it.
Cluelessness is the Mother of Invention 