Out of the Ashes of a Nightmare Comes Hope

It was a cold icy night on December 12 in Denton, Texas.  I had just obsessively cleaned my tiny cedar-walled apartment, lit my gas stove on low beside my bed and settled in to smoke enough pot to help me forget the misery of the past two months. My three cats had nestled in around my legs under the blanket for a winter's nap.  All seemed better than could be expected in spite of the fact that my mother had attempted suicide the weekend before.  Upon admittance to the psychiatric hospital where she interned as an Occupational Therapist, she was able to convince the head Psychiatrist that she was mentally competent and would not make an attempt on her life again so was released to go home that same evening.  I felt scared, depressed, out of control and that my mother's life hung in the balance with the weight of her survival on my shoulders.  In October I had made the painful choice to abort my pregnancy and had not been prepared for the onslaught of feelings from that emotionally, spiritually and physically.  

So the unfolding of my nightmare life that night shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone least of all me.  Within the first half hour of heavy smoking on my bong, I began to have horrible fearful thoughts.  An image came to my mind from a horror movie that my Dad had taken me and some friends to for Halloween when I was 14 and my mind had further taken the vision of a body with no arms and legs lumbering into my room with my mother's face.  Shaking uncontrollably, I phoned my best friend, Cindy, who lived two houses down from me with a house she shared with two friends.  Although her boyfriend was spending the night, she invited me to come sleep on their couch so I left my space heater on low so my cats and plants wouldn't freeze and headed down the street to safety.

Within minutes of settling into blankets on pillows on my friends' sofa, I heard a swirl of furious movement in the house.  Cindy's boyfriend, Robbie, was talking fast and harsh as he ran out the door and down the street. Within seconds Robbie came running back yelling at the top of his lungs, "Lynn your house is on fire."  I jumped up and ran down the street to see large orange and yellow angry flames licking the windows of my apartment. My knees went weak, all my cats were inside and my apartment was also one of four inside of an old rock house...there were other people at risk.  I screamed and wailed at the top of my lungs in desperation and in a moment of disorientation Robbie thought that he was hearing me screaming from inside so he kicked in the front door.  The minute Robbie kicked in the front door, the fire took hold and boomed into a raging mass of flame of desolation.  I sat on my knees on the cold concrete sidewalk whimpering.  Robbie soon ran outside with my oldest Siamese cat, Daphne, who was alive.  He ran back into my apartment and came back out with my big fluffy male cat Avatar who had been frantically coiling up under the sink looking for protection.  Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement and my grey cat Gandalf, came running up to me after jumping out of one of the busted windows.  All my cats had made it so I jumped into action.  I ran up to the house next door belonging to our landlord and banged frantically until his wife answered. It took a while to wake Richard from his drunken stupor and when he finally came to he was ranting and raving and calling me a stupid bitch, asking what I had done.  I ran to all the other apartments in the house waking up my neighbors, luckily they all made it.

We all sat outside watching with horror as the flames continued their destruction waiting for the firemen to arrive.  Once the flames had been put out and everyone who lived in the house had found a safe place to be until daylight, I called my father who lived in another country to tell him what had happened.  He couldn't quite believe what I was telling him.  I found out later that he had even called the Denton Fire Department to find out if there was a fire on my street but because it had happened at 1am my fire had not made it to their books yet (this was before computers!)  He called my step-mother's parents who lived in San Antonio and because of my irresponsible behavior over the last few years, sent them a check to cover expenses for clothes and supplies for me.  

So many friends came to my aid in spite of my reckless reputation.  Cindy has photos of me stuck in a book somewhere as I picked through the ashes of my apartment in hopes of scavenging something that survived.  All the plants another friend had temporarily loaned me had perished. A leather coat that I had been so proud to possess disfigured out of shape. Both blow dryers melted against the wall. But I was grateful that me, the other people in the house and my cats were physically unscathed.

I think it was the purring of my cats cuddling up next to me in a temporary makeshift bed in a boyfriend's room in his frat house that gave me hope that there would be better days ahead.  I was still very young, headstrong and naive, ignorant about the correlation of my choices in life and their consequences but a little seed of hope had been planted through the outpouring of love from so many.  Even though the next five or so years would continue to unveil the hard realities of life, I'm grateful that seeds of love were able to take hold in my heart.