Day 11

PROMPT:10 minute free write: fire.

I’m not sure I really could’ve prepared myself for what I was going to see. It had been five years since the fire at my parents’ place. It was a fluke electrical fire. Bad wires, faulty something. I hadn’t quite known at the time. There were a few important details: Mom and Dad are fine and almost everything else is gone. I hadn’t come home then because I’d been too busy with work in LA. That’s what I’d told myself anyway. I think I used that as an excuse to not have to do the clean. I’d always been sentimental. I knew what going home to see that would do to me.

After that there just hadn’t been a good time. I’d come back to visit them for holidays. I’d seen the new apartment. I’d been directed to the box of things that were the remnants of my past life. Things that I would probably have no use for but had held onto because I thought someday I would need them. Math notes from 7th grade that I had expected to need in High School. Three of the same birthday card from my Grandfather from consecutive years.

I had gone through during my six months living at home after college graduation. I had sat on the floor and looked through my old bins of junk and cried for days at lost thoughts and memories. At people I’d forgotten, friendships that I suddenly missed so much it felt like a hole had been torn through my heart, the first CD I ever owned. Nostalgia had never been an easy emotion for me to swallow. I’d thrown out as much as I could, but my room remained the same cluttered collection of mementos from the past until the day it went up in flames. And I knew that I couldn’t confront the loss of those things head on.

The idea of losing so much and not even knowing what was gone paralyzed me. I spent nights awake for months trying to remember what was in the back corners of cabinets. My desk at work had a notepad in the top draw with a list that said “things that were in my room.” It killed me every time I remembered something new. Something else lost forever. Presents from camp friends. My keychain collection. My first pair of high heels. My prom dress.

But something had brought me down this street today. I couldn’t tell you what it was, since I’d been so adeptly avoiding it for so long. Yet I found myself here anyway, staring at the beautiful house that looked nothing like the one I’d grown up in. I stood in front of my car, facing the house for about ten minutes before deciding that the effect of the loss was gone now that it had been rebuilt. There was nothing left here to be nostalgic about.

I took a few steps across the street and put my hand on the tree that I had hit way too many times trying to parallel park in front of the house. I looked down to see the familiar knot at the base of the trunk that looked like the head of a snake emerging from the roots. Some things stay the same. I felt the emotions bubbling up and crossed back to my car, locking myself in as quickly as I could before the tears started. Clearly, I’d been wrong about there being nothing left.