Smoke Falls

It's taken a good long time for me to write about this. I thought I'd given up the ghost. I was so nearly one myself.

Some time ago, between midnight plus 12 minutes tonight and my last derelict post about sniffing opiates-I almost died.

I'd had a nice night at Daniel's house. It was the usual that I've written about for years now. Nothing new: wine bottles and stories and a pile of Camel lights. Sister-laughter. I think it was Memorial Day. It certainly was a Memorial Night.

I woke sometime just before dawn, when the night is blackest. I don't know why I woke at all. I don't know what roused me from our (even for our standards) epic night of wine and laughter. I just know that when I did finally take my first twitching breath into life, it burned like hell. It tasted like the end of the world. I could scarcely breathe at all.

I was confused and disoriented. I could barely navigate the familiar terrain of my own home. I could see nothing for the thick, sick smelling smoke that filled my home. I caught glimpses of light-what I thought was fire. I ran first toward it, then away from it. I finally found my front door.

Either the Goddess or my Primal Brain took over. As soon as my bare feet hit the wet, dewy grass of my front yard, I began to run. My thoughts were simple, urgent, heedless of my body's ailing condition. I ran faster than I ever had, tirelessly, to Daniels door in that darkest hour of the night.

It was, I later understood, a miracle that he was still up at all. He should have been dead to the world, pardon the pun, hours before I banged on his windows and on his doors.

He and his partner phoned the fire department and took care of me as the Historic District became a parade of lights and and noises. Eerie, still smoke crawled from the open front door of my ancient house. It did not rush, it just slithered along in its own smoky cadence; its killing walk.

Daniel tells me that I was inhumanly collected during the tragedy. I only remember fragements: shattered-glass recollections of my near demise, my rescue. I remember how it felt: the hazy, underwater feeling caused by the carbon monoxide. The unquenchable thirst that oxygen deprivation brings. The disinfecting shower; the shivering, tearless state of shock as I tried to sleep, wrapped in Daniel's too-tight clothes and too-few blankets.

The strangest thing is, in all of that-is that my house is fine. For a week it smelled of death, of smoke, but the house is fine. The only thing I lost was my blue Marilyn Monroe couch-to one of my beloved Camel lights, I assume. It has been replaced by a nice brown leather number that honestly looks tailor-made to my surroundings.

Each day, though, I find reminders of the smoke that fell that night, of my near-death moments. A fine haze of revolting brown lined everything on an exposed surface. Each roll of toilet paper I reach for contains exactly three layers of smoke-tarnished tissue. Each towel I unfolded, before I washed them all, had six dead-brown lines criscrossing their material. Each glass, each plate, each rug I move leavese behind a whitewashed version of itself. A place the smoke did not touch.

The smoke touched me though. For days, I peed pumpkin orange. I was so short of breath and confused-yes, for days!-that I could barely work. The fatigue and the confusion have passed me by, thankfully, but the fear has not. Each time I smell smoke, my body runs with chills and fear.

I am not afraid of dying, no, not at all-I am afraid of the pain I'd leave behind. I am afraid, more selfishly, of the pain I chose to endure, or, I pray, the love I chose to experience, by choosing not to die that night. I do believe it was my choice. All odds were against me. By any reasonable man's accounting, I should have simply not woken up. I wonder if it would have been easier, or harder, on the weighing scales of heaven. On the playing field of life.

Smoke falls.