fireproof

You'll never forget the sound of your mother screaming for help standing in the middle of her burning home, watching her every possession—from the hand-crocheted tablecloths that traveled with her from a war-torn home country 30 years ago to the electronics that her husband so preciously cared for—become obscured by a thick blanket of toxic dust. Or the terror that sets in when you realize you have seconds to move your disabled father and his 20-pound wheelchair out of the house because he can't scale the single step that separates him from the safety of the backyard. Or the panic that hits you, hours later, when you think of what would have become of him if nobody had been home to help him escape. It’s a thought that still brings me great anxiety when I least expect it in the quiet of the cavernous rental home we have uneasily settled into for the last 12 months.

Everything smelled like fire. In the ash- and asbestos-contaminated cloud that suffocated what would soon be known as my pre-disaster life, I found myself remarkably unprepared to accept the reality brought upon by the worst day of my life: February 25, 2017.

I was still in my pajamas watching an Amazon series called Catastrophe when I heard the smoke alarm go off. I was supposed to be at the gym for a “Core Fusion” class at noon, but my laziness got the best of me that Saturday morning and I figured I would just attend the next class on the schedule. I didn't think much of the blaring alarm. It often went off when we’d get too ambitious in the kitchen or when a piece of pita bread fell through the cracks and seared and smoked dramatically, only to fizzle out in undramatic fashion.

I ran to the kitchen and saw it lit up by flames, orange and hot, violently spitting out of the machine disguised as an innocuous household appliance. The roar of the blaze—and the adrenaline pumping in my ears—was so loud, I could barely hear my mom screaming to me, in her frightened stupor, to throw water into the clothes dryer. In those harried moments, I had the wherewithal to know that I could be electrocuted by the volatile reaction. I could remember only two tips from disaster preparedness exercises: "Stop, drop, and roll" and "Get out." So, I screamed the latter over and over until my mom finally listened and—reluctantly—followed my dad to the backyard from the back patio door. She kept saying she wanted to go back inside to save her house. I just kept screaming at her to get out. The flames were growing bigger and I didn't think any of us could control the beast that was quickly engulfing the house that hosted my favorite arts and crafts birthday parties as a kid and the groups of friends that milled about nervously before high school dances.

My throat was raw from a combination of the screaming and the toxic fumes that I was inhaling every second we were in there. And when I finally got out myself, out of the kitchen door, I was hit with the fear that my mom might have snuck in through the back patio door to save what she could before the house that she had called home for the last 22 years crumbled to the ground. I reached for the garden hose just beyond the fiery room and attempted to extinguish the growing flames. I pulled up my shirt to cover my nose and mouth. I panicked. I was terrified. I dropped the hose and ran to the front yard to flag down the fire engines that were supposed to be on their way. They were delayed by another fire nearby, so we waited and waited until another group was deployed to our disaster.

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I couldn't hear her anymore. The fire was just too loud. Have you ever been surrounded by the deafening sound of a 65-year-old house—with its layers of solid wood, drywall, and paint—crackling and bubbling and popping in the scorching heat of an uncontained blaze? I wanted to believe she and my dad were standing in the backyard at a safe distance from the house. I wanted to believe that the fire hadn’t reached the back of the house and trapped them against our retaining walls, but I couldn't see them and I couldn't hear them and I couldn't reach them. And in those 12 minutes that it took for fire engine 71 to pull up to my beloved home (as my ruthless neighbors stood across the street documenting the worst day of my life for their Snapchat followers), and in those 10 minutes that it took for them to tear down the walls and break the windows and destroy the roof to put out the fire enough for me to run to the backyard to confirm that my parents were not, in fact, being burned alive inside, I think a little bit of me died.

I remember begging the firemen and women to tell me that my parents were OK. I ran from uniform to uniform, in socks that were wet from the morning dew that lingered on the grass even at high noon that day, pleading with them to tell me if they were still in the house or if they were huddled safely in the backyard. But they wouldn’t even make eye contact with me. Every diverted glance convinced me that there was bad news on the other side of their distant gaze. Visions of my parents' lifeless bodies being carried out of the house swirled in my head and the world started spinning.

When I was finally allowed to run to the back of the house, I found my parents there, unharmed, and I clung to them praising whatever powerful force kept them safe for those critical minutes. After the fire trucks pulled out of my street, the one on which I learned how to ride a bike without any help and kissed boys goodnight under the streetlight, we were faced with the reality that we couldn’t stay. That entire afternoon, we dragged filing cabinets full of what valuables we had left and drove to a nearby hotel. It was dark, and we felt like weary travelers checking in to our lodging for the night as if on some unexpected detour on an ambitious road trip. Except we weren’t on vacation. We were on the first leg of a long, very, very difficult journey that none of us could anticipate. We checked in and I finally felt the adrenaline drain from my ears. I cried all night still soaking in the stench of the day. Will I ever forget it?

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Trauma has the unbridled power to transform you. With its cruel disregard for comfort, preference, or autonomy, it puts an end to life as you know it and draws a big, dark, ugly line between the person you once were and the one you were forced to become in order to survive. Looking towards an uncertain future that is marked so heavily by the past seems unbearable. It’s been 12 months, and sometimes it’s still hard to imagine what it will be like to move back into a house that was so recklessly and unfairly stripped of every memory. It will be new, but it will be different. Though its spirit survived, its bones were mangled and misshapen, and every shred of familiarity was destroyed forever.

Watching people in my own community, in neighborhoods near and far, embarking on the long, distressing process of escaping a natural disaster, being harassed by ambulance-chasers to sign settlement deals as soon as the fire trucks pull out of your driveway, combing through what’s left of your life and walking away with a trash bag full of things you can’t bear to let go, taking inventory of every item you have ever purchased in your entire life—including itemizing every single bobby pin, bottle of nail polish, and sock—and attempting to rebuild (your life and your home) from scratch...it reopens wounds that will never, ever heal. My heart aches for you and your journey ahead. It’s confusing and complicated and will challenge you in ways you never could imagine.

For now, I’m ready to say goodbye to my worst days, though they still linger in every new item I buy to replace the one that I lost, in every creak of the rental furniture that I lay my head on at the end of the day, and in every ounce of sadness in my mother’s voice when she remembers the sight of the inventory crew hauling her memories away from her battered home.

In the words of Maya Angelou, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

May we soon come out of it.