When Water Flows Strongly

You know what they don’t ever tell you about having a house burn down? How whatever the fire hasn’t destroyed, the water has. Nobody says that part first. The flames obviously are talked about, but words cannot do justice to watching the blue and orange hues or the crunching sounds of a crumpling infrastructure. What it feels like to watch yourself lose everything.

They tell you about the smoke, the sirens, and I can tell you all about the neighbors standing outside at 2am pretending as if they’re not recording and whispering among themselves. And when the roof collapsed in on itself, watching the whole house collapse into itself, it almost felt like the house was pretending to be a home the whole time. But they do not tell you about the water.

Everything before the fire flashed through my mind like a quick slideshow of horrendous Polaroids, and in comparison, this felt like nothing. Not because it didn’t matter but because I had been living in fire for years.

How do you come to terms with being set up for failure? I don’t think you do all at once. I think you learn it the same way water learns a crack in the ceiling. Slowly, then before you know it, it is everywhere. It starts as one little stain on a ceiling tile you convince yourself is nothing. Something you can paint over. Something nobody else will notice if the lighting is right. Something you can cover up. Then one day, the whole ceiling sags under the weight of everything that was leaking behind it. That’s what my childhood felt like. Not one big explosion. Not one dramatic scene with music swelling in the background. More like a slow leak no one fixed because everyone was too busy arguing over who caused the flood.

My whole childhood felt like waiting for the dams to burst, for the other shoe to drop. And it never disappointed in that manner. Before anyone could do anything about it, my siblings and I were swept away by that flood. And I guess that is where the fire really started. Long before that house burned down, before the Red Cross voucher, before the wet ash and campfire smell, there was another kind of smoke I had been breathing for years. The kind that comes from being a child in a home where the adults are the emergencies, and somehow you become the first responder. Somehow you become the one the officers are asking what really happened. I didn’t know how to name it then. I just knew when to stay quiet, when to step in, when to disappear, when to make myself useful, when to read a room before I even walked into it. And when to react.

The first time I remember understanding that something was wrong, I was still young enough that I should’ve been caring about toys, cartoons, and what I wanted for dinner. Instead, I was already learning how to measure danger by the sound and speed of footsteps, by the way a door shut, by the way someone’s tone changed from normal to sharp. My life had never been respectful of clean lines. If anything, it felt more like the application of Chaos Theory in meteorology. One little change in air pressure causing completely different weather patterns across the planet. One small shift in someone’s mood changing the entire climate of the house. I learned how to express feelings that weren’t really how I felt. I learned how to agree with someone when they were upset just to keep the situation from getting worse. I learned how to shift into survival mode before anything even happened, and something always eventually happened. It was like there was an internal barometer for the pressure in the home each day, preinstalled into my body before I ever had the words to explain it or comprehension to understand it. I could feel tension rising before anyone else admitted it was there.

A child shouldn’t be cognizant of that kind of survival mechanism. A child shouldn’t be worried about things reserved for adults. A child shouldn’t have to bear witness to the volatile nature some relationships can have. My childhood was not soft. It wasn’t some glowing little memory box people open when they want to feel innocent again. Mine had smoke damage. Mine had water stains. Mine had damage that seemed unsalvageable.

I knew from as far back as I can remember that I had to put out fires for the people around me who should’ve been watering my growth. People love calling children “mature” when what they really mean, and don’t even realize it, is “neglected, but functioning well enough that no one has to feel guilty enough to intervene.” Nobody wants to look at a child carrying adult weight and think that maybe this isn’t resilience. Maybe this is neglect wearing a good mask. Maybe this is self-preservation. Maybe I need to intervene. When a child becomes the family’s emotional support system, the babysitter, the peacekeeper, the witness, and the parent, everyone wants to clap for how grown they are. Nobody wants to ask why they had to grow up so fast.

That’s the thing about survival. It doesn’t always look like survival when it is happening. Sometimes it looks like being dependable. Sometimes it looks like being the oldest sibling who is responsible and cares a lot about the younger ones. Sometimes it looks like love. Sometimes it’s just a child trying not to drown.

When the fire started, I was the only one awake. It happened solely by chance. I was lying on my bedroom floor because I couldn’t sleep, scrolling on my phone, when I smelled it. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I smelled something. I got up and opened the door. Thick smoke was starting to engulf the kitchen, almost like it had a will of its own. I immediately woke everyone up and got everyone, and all the animals we knew about, out of the house. Then another roommate, Franny, realized her dogs were still inside, in the room behind the kitchen, near where I had originally seen the smoke start. I didn’t think twice and neither did she. She followed behind me as we went back into the house. We knew somewhere in our heads that we were in danger, but we didn’t fully realize it in the moment because we were on a mission. These were living, breathing animals, and they didn’t deserve to die like that. So, we held our breath, covered our faces with wet shirts, and went back in. As we rushed toward that door, there was a weird underlying feeling of sudden strength. It wasn’t adrenaline. I know that feeling. This felt different. It was as if water were flowing through me and I could do anything. When water flows strongly, it comes with great power. It has a natural strength that almost makes it seem alive. So, when we ran as fast as we could to that back door, it wasn’t self-grandeur or mania. It was the natural strength that comes from wanting to save a life because you recognize fear.

We both knew you can’t just open a door in a fire. We both knew doing so can essentially lead to an explosion of flames. We both knew the danger we had walked into. We knew it, but it didn’t matter. Our survival was being put second to the dogs’ survival. Around us were sporadic bursts of strong flames. The heat was so intense it felt like I was being burned without having even been touched by it. We didn’t dwell on that. We stayed low, and Franny managed to open the door. The dogs rushed out, thankfully okay. When we ran back outside, I was happy they were alive, especially since the roof collapsed not even fifteen minutes later.

But standing there near the flames, I felt something else too. Disdain. If I and another adult could run into a literal fire for two dogs, why did no adults run into the metaphorical fire to help me and my siblings as kids? Why did no one put their survival second to help us? Why were people not more caring or willing to intervene? Why were the only two women in the house willing to run back in and save those lives? What made us throw self-preservation out the window? What had made us so accustomed to danger? Why did the fire feel like just another situation that would need to be fixed and cleaned up by me? Why do I always have to fix a mess I didn’t make?