Time, Warped.

A fall day in 2018.

I sit drinking my coffee, listening to the guy playing the fiddle in the square below as the tourists pass him by. His repertoire is seemingly limited. Or maybe he only plays what "works" for his audience of vacationers. Whatever his reason, this guy plays non-stop traditional-Québéçois-sounding fiddle tunes. The next guy who will take over that corner after him plays piano. Last week, it was non-stop Pachebel's Canon. The fiddle stops, and a kid is screaming.

Eight floors above, I take another sip of my coffee and type, still somewhat drowsy. I woke up at 11:36 a.m. The bedroom is dark with the blackout curtain closed; it's easy to lose all sense of time.

***

July 20, 2018, around 1:45 a.m.

I wake up suddenly and see that there is smoke in our bedroom. Immediately, I wake my boyfriend. There's no question about what's going on; we know we have to get out. I throw on the green hoodie I've kept hanging on the closet door handle for months, you know, just in case there were ever a fire or some other emergency during the night. I head to the window and pop the screen out. It's then that I realize the window is very narrow and the way it opens would make it difficult for anyone to squeeze through. The ground is a good ways down: there are one and a half floors between us and the pavement. I see a couple of people already gathered on the street. My boyfriend tells me we can make it out the front door, so we leave. He is only wearing his robe; I'm in my undies and the zipped-up hoodie. Both of us are barefoot. As soon as we get to the downstairs door, he looks at me and says he is going back to try to get Slinky.

***

We adopted Slinky about six weeks or so after Booboo died in May 2017. We weren't planning on getting another cat so soon. We went to the shelter just to visit kitties, not to adopt one. But there was something about Slinky and the way he looked at me. I felt connected to him, much like how I felt with Booboo. My boyfriend said we shouldn't rush such a big decision and that we should come back in a week.

Slinky was not the type of cat that most people would be drawn too. He was not an adorable little kitten, begging for attention from every visitor. Slinky held back, out of the limelight. His tail was atypically short; the vet later told us he must have been hit by a car or something since there was a scar at the top and he was also missing some back claws. It was my boyfriend who first noticed him and pointed him out to me. He was different from all the others. I felt his little green-yellow eyes could see straight into my soul. Right there in his cage with the door opened enough so we could pet him, Slinky rolled over to show me his tummy and let me scratch him, even as the water from his water bowl spilled over and he got wet. My boyfriend was not ready to adopt that day, though, so we left and planned to come back in a week.

A few days later, my boyfriend said we should go get him. We were saddened at the thought of anyone other than us adopting him. We had already begun to think of him as "our cat." We were showing people his photo and talking about him. I went alone, while my boyfriend was working, just to adopt him as soon as possible. I spent time getting to know Slinky better before proceeding with the adoption paperwork, to be certain we were a good fit. That time together confirmed our connection, and I knew he was the right kitty for us.

When I let him out of his transport cage at home, he walked around cautiously but seemed to be pretty comfortable. Soon he was sitting on the couch with us and following us around. His original name was "Phantôme" so we thought about calling him Spooky, but after just a couple of days, we agreed that "Slinky" fit him best. He would slink up beyond us silently while we were in the kitchen, and we'd almost fall over him when we turned to move. He could also go from very compact and curled up to extremely long and stretched out, and he loved to roll around. He embodied his name fully.

The first night Slinky was home with us, I woke up to him standing right on my chest, intently peering down at my face. It was completely unexpected and the only time I know of that he did that. He kept us awake most of the night as he snuggled with us both and we petted him, each of us happy as a clam at high tide.

***

After I-don't-know-how-much time, I guess a couple of minutes, my boyfriend comes back down, out the downstairs door without Slinky. He was unable to catch him. Slinky was running around terrified, and there was too much smoke for him to stay any longer and to try to find him. We cling to each other and cry. I'm so thankful my boyfriend did not stay too long and made it back out. I worry about Slinky. Soon the firetrucks arrive and fire people and hoses are everywhere. I tell a couple of fire people about Slinky being in our apartment and point out which apartment it is. They explain they have to evacuate all the people in the adjacent buildings first. (All the buildings are attached and very old.) We move out of the way to let them do their work.

Sitting on the step of another apartment building on kitty-corner to our street, I call my parents in the middle of the night to share this news that will keep them awake all night. We realize that we will need somewhere to go because we can't go home. My boyfriend's local family is on vacation, though, so we call a good friend. He's a recovering night owl and lives close by. And he's about our waist size. I call him, and he answers. I tell him what happened and ask if he can come bring us something to wear. There are other people from neighboring buildings gathering to watch the action. I feel them looking at us, barefoot and nominally clothed. But I don't care much; I'm too overwhelmed by this bomb that has gone off in our lives. And at least my behind is fully covered by the hoodie so that the stone step isn't cold or rough feeling and no one sees my underwear.

I'm coughing, though. There are paramedics walking around, and they come talk to us. They ask if we want to be checked. I explain I have asthma, and I don't know if I need to be checked or not. We get checked. The ambulance guy is really nice. He tells me how crazy of a night it's been. My blood pressure, heart rate, or something is high. He monitors me and says it's normal in this situation. Our friend had shown up as we were walking to the ambulance. He patiently waits on us to finish. He later says he talked to the post-disaster-cleaning people who had arrived, even before the fire was out. I'm in the ambulance a good while. My boyfriend leaves for a bit as they check me. The ambulance guy asks if I would like a sheet to wrap up in; I accept and it makes me feel a little better, kind of like I have a security blanket to hold onto.

My boyfriend comes back and while they are checking him, or maybe after they have finished...things are a bit of a blur...a fireman comes to the ambulance, asking about what Slinky looks like. We describe Slinky, and he leaves again. A little bit later, the ambulance guy has someone tell him something on his walkie-talkie. I can't make it out, but he turns and informs us that they found Slinky and that he died of smoke inhalation. Our hearts plummet.

Before leaving the ambulance, we have to sign that if we refuse to go to the hospital and if we die or something, that it is not the ambulance people's fault. I wonder if I should be worried about dying later of smoke inhalation.

Our friend is there, still waiting on us, ready with a hug and a bag of clothes. My boyfriend speaks with the firefighters who are taking a break because things are winding down. They say it looks like it was an electrical fire but that there would be official investigations later. I have to pee, so I decide that I want to go to the hotel a block over and ask to use their bathroom. While walking, I call our building manager person and leave a voicemail. I figured I'd want to know if one of my buildings had a fire, even if it was the middle of the night. I walk into the hotel barefoot and wrapped in a sheet. Despite my bizarre attire, they welcome me and let me use their bathroom. We ask them to call a taxi for us because our friend's house is too far to walk to without shoes on city sidewalks. After we get in the taxi, the driver comments on all the fire trucks and says that something's going on. We say that it was for our apartment building. The stench of smoke coming off of us is overwhelming.

***

Below on the corner, the fiddle player has stopped, and the pianist has taken over. He's not playing Pachelbel's Canon yet.

***

Our friend brings us to his apartment. We get online and send an email to our loved ones, explaining what happened. Our fire smell fills his apartment, and he opens the windows. My boyfriend says we have to take a shower and wash our hair and try to remove some of the stench. He tells me he wants to shave his hair off. He goes to take his shower first. The water releases a flood of emotions, so I go to check on him and be there with him in the pain.

***

The piano is drowned out by the sound of a guy singing opera. I glance out the window to see that "opera guy" (a man in town who sings opera everywhere he goes) is biking down the hill. After he passes, I again hear some nondescript classical song playing.

***

Next it's my turn to take a shower. After removing the pungent clothes, I step under the warm water. I weep for Slinky. My boyfriend comes to check on me and comfort me. I wash my hair over and over, wondering if it will ever stop smelling like smoke. After we're clean, my boyfriend suggests we try to sleep some. I lay down but can't, so I get up so that I won't keep him awake too. My head and emotions cannot slow down enough to sleep. I write emails and messages instead. I message my boyfriend's mom, who is travelling in a different time zone. I text my colleagues around 5 a.m. or so, not realizing it might wake them up. They decide that as soon as the stores open, they will go and get us some clothes, undies, toothpaste, flip flops, basic toiletries, and a bra for me.

I call the insurance company. They take down a lot of info, give me a reference number, and say someone will follow up as soon as regular work hours begin. A good friend who works near my apartment calls, and she says she is going to ask her boss if she can walk over to our apartment to let us know what it looks like. I worry that the front door is unsecured and that whatever we might have left could be stolen. The building manager person calls me back and says that we can come by the apartment. My boyfriend wakes up and is as ready to go as I am. It's a 15-minute walk, and we prepare to go, not caring that we are barefoot. Thankfully, my colleagues arrive right as we are ready to leave. I put on the bra and flip-flops, but keep on my friend's everything-else because we are determined to get to the apartment and see what's going on.

My coworkers drive us to our street, and two of my female friends are already there on the sidewalk. All the building's windows are wide open, and the smell of fire lingers heavy in the hot morning air.

The fire was an electrical fire that started in the utility room two floors below our bathroom/office area. Then it spread to the unoccupied apartment adjacent to the utility room, which is below our bedroom area. Since no one was living there, it took more time before anyone realized there was fire. The fire moved up through our downstairs neighbor's bathroom.

We are allowed to go in with the apartment manager person. She says it has to be quick. As I climb the stairs in my brand-new flip flops, I'm careful to step over the glass from the entry door's broken window pane. We grab a few things while we are there, filling the reusable grocery bags my colleague loaned us. There is soot everywhere, and the apartment is in chaos. Two shelving units have been moved out of the office: one to the bathroom doorway, one to the bedroom doorway. We see where the fire fighters broke into several of our walls, including the one behind where those bookshelves had been, to make sure the fire had not moved through them. I notice that my three favorite hats—my two Goorin Bros. hats (a fedora and a cloche) and my Jacaru Australian hat—have been trampled. It's deeply unsettling to face the physical evidence of how fragile life is, how quickly things can change, and how little we control.

I go into the bedroom to get more undies, stepping over boxes of stationery, tubes of acrylic paints, and random other items scattered out of their normal context. What I choose to grab is not necessarily logical: my anniversary ring, my cowboy boots, my leather coat, an antique Norwegian wall-hanging, a few family photos, hard drives, a folder with important documents, wallet, keys, an autographed book, and my Chaco sandals. My boyfriend grabs some essentials too. His choices are a little more logical. Not long after we make our way back out to the bright, sun-lit street, we enter the apartment again, this time with the cleaning people because they want to look around to get an idea of the work ahead. We take the opportunity to get a few more things out.

We decide to go get my medication from the pharmacy. While we are there, we see the post-office counter and realize we need to forward our mail. Our insurance agent calls and asks us to meet her at 11 a.m. at the apartment. So we go back again.

She talks with us, letting us sit on her tailgate. We must look as bad as we feel. She asks us to explain what happened; she asks us what we do for work. She explains a lot of stuff about how the insurance works and the next steps, but I don't absorb much. My head is full of fog.

We end up re-entering with her; she looks at the office, with stuff everywhere, including a table that had been thrown on top of my printer stand and sewing machine table. She asks us if the office looked like that before. I said, "No, not at all, though it was in need of some organization." She tells us to take what we need for work and life for the next while. She explains that the apartment won't be very secure and to take all our valuables. We grab more clothes, and I get my tax files and as many personal files as I can find, my jewelry box, my cameras and lenses. My boyfriend thinks to grab a fleece. It's blazing hot in July, but we are supposed to be going to Norway in a few weeks. We remember to get my brand-new hiking boots that I hadn't even worn but had bought for the trip. We do not remember to get the backpacks we bought for the trip.

Each time we go in, I have to brace myself. It's like re-entering hell or something. The stench raises my heart rate, and the state of the apartment is a shock every time. Just about two hours before the fire, we had booked our within-Norway plane pass for our vacation and gone to bed. Everything was normal only a few hours earlier.

We're notified that the apartment people have admitted fault. This, our insurance agent tells us, is exceedingly rare. Usually they try to avoid blame. I'm angered to have my suspicions confirmed. Since 2010, I had expressed concern about the electricity in my apartment numerous times. For example, I'd had a ceiling light with faulty wiring for a year and a half. They'd said they'd send "a man" when they had one available...

The apartment building is uninhabitable. They're not even sure they'll renovate. Whether they do or not, we know we could never live there again. I don't trust them, and the awful memories overwhelm the good ones.

Two other friends offer to let us stay in their second home, an apartment in a cute, touristy part of town. We have a view of the river, and the water has been calming. There are cruise ships coming and going, and tourists wander around everywhere. Living here feels a bit like being on vacation.

***

It was a race to get everything together to leave for our trip to Norway. We decide to go, that we need this break now more than ever. Before we leave, we need to find a new place to live. We visit a number and ask questions about the electricity and wiring and who did the work and when. I look at the size of the windows, the location of smoke detectors, and the number of possible exits. One apartment is our favorite and makes us feel safest.

Before we leave, we find out that we have to go to the dry cleaning place to go through every fabric item we own—clothes, towels, sheets, rugs, shoes, purses, duvets, sleeping bags, leotards, socks, rags, everything—to decide what to keep and what to trash. The estimation to clean everything was too high for our policy, so we have to make choices. For a long time, I'd been wanting to go through my closet and Marie-Kondo-cize it, but doing it in one day at a dry cleaners with a respiratory mask was not what I had envisioned. But even so, I remember her advice and remind myself to ask if it sparks joy. I also decide to ask myself if I find it useful or beautiful. Through tears, at times, I move things to the right to keep or to the left to trash. I try to send thankful thoughts to all the items I am ruthlessly condemning to the trash. I feel horrible about the needless waste of it all. The memories that surface with certain items threaten to pull me under, like a riptide.

I get rid of a lot. Much more than I keep. I trash all my leggings, even though I wear them with dresses all fall and winter. But it just doesn't make sense to pay over $6 each to clean them (plus extra fees for weight and water) when most of them are very worn with repaired holes. That same logic guides every single decision about every rag, tank top, or piece of fabric that had been saved for a sewing project. I studied the prices in advance and have a pretty good idea of what things would cost to clean, so that helps my decision-making process. I decide to trash my wedding dress. I hadn't known what to do with it anyways. I loved the dress, but things ended so painfully with my ex that I had just shoved it into a bag and jammed it in the back of a closet. But when faced with the idea of paying $125 plus water fees and weight fees to keep it? Well, I cut that anchor. Wedding shoes, veil, all gone. My mom's pink suede mini skirt with a scalloped hem from the '60s? Totally worth the $43 dollars to clean. And of course, there's no question about whether I'm keeping the table cloth and napkins that my great-aunt gave me, the ones my great-grandmother had bought in Austria (or Switzerland? I should really find out) when she was a young woman. And I keep the two quilts my granny, my mom's mother, made. But some things are deemed unrecoverable, including my three favorite hats and a baby blanket and pillow my great-grandmother made me.

Right after culling through all our fabric belongings, we drive over to sign a lease for the dream apartment. It's the first one we contacted, on July 20, just 12 or maybe 15 hours after the fire. My boyfriend saw it right as it was posted, showed it to me, and then immediately sent a message. We were first on the list, but because of the vacation schedules of our contact and the current renters, it took a few weeks until we could visit. We visited other places in the meantime while holding out hope for that one. We finally saw it and loved it. Signing the lease feels like the start of better chapter ahead.

***

We head to Norway with just our backpacks. We need to escape, even if just for a while. I am hoping the fjords will help heal us. During our first night of sleep after arriving, we are jolted awake by a fire alarm. Adrenaline shoots through us and we grab our wallets, passports and a few essentials while throwing on clothes as we head into the hallway. People are just standing there looking around and talking and not doing anything. My boyfriend yells at them in English to get out as we hurry to the stairs. Three stories down, we exit into the lobby. The hotel employee informs us that it's not a real fire. Casually, like it's no big deal. And maybe it's not, if you've never been through a fire, certainly not one just three weeks earlier. But we are shaken to the core. We think about leaving right then, in the middle of the night, and going back to the airport to wait for our 6 a.m. flight up north, but we decide to stay and try to rest a bit at the hotel.

***

Our smoke detector did not go off during our fire. I don't know why I woke up. I'm usually a very sound sleeper, but I just woke up, sat up and saw our bedroom was filled with black smoke. Neither my boyfriend nor I heard a fire alarm, not even once we were outside. Our friend who met us does not recall having heard one either. In a building with 7 apartments and a utility room, we did not hear one alarm. The fire report says one alarm was functioning...but we didn't hear a thing.

***

Every time I leave our friends' apartment where we are staying temporarily, I check the stove, coffee pot, toaster and air conditioner multiple times to make sure everything is unplugged and turned off. At the beginning, I would feel stressed even after leaving, even though I had checked everything multiple times. For a while, my boyfriend was waking up in a panic, sometimes several times a night, thinking there was a fire. The first time it happened, he was out of the bed and across the room before he realized that there was no fire. It took a while to calm down.

***

I guess these things take time. The two months or so since July 20 have felt interminable. Our time in Norway was fun; it was an amazing vacation. We were mostly able to forget about the stuff back at home, but three weeks is a long time to be gone away from home, even when you don't have one. We were ready to come back and move into our apartment and start our new life. Only we knew we still had a month to wait.

***

I finish the last sip of my coffee as a car stopped below is blaring "Bohemian Rhapsody" through open windows. On repeat. Nothing really matters, nothing really matters to me... Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me... Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

***

On plane ride back from Norway, I found myself wishing that I could just go back to my old life. Go back to our old apartment, see Slinky, return to normal. It felt like all the awfulness maybe was a bad dream. But, of course, we came back and had to face the reality of what had happened, being in between apartments, feeling my chest tighten up when I walk in my old neighborhood, crying on my way to ballet, and talking to Slinky to tell him I miss him.

***

We're slowly reconstructing. So far, it's been little steps: buying make-up, essential oils, nail polish, bras. There are so, so many things to buy when you start from zero. A friend of my boyfriend's mom, her daughter and her daughter's cousin and stepsister all gave me clothes, and so did two of my friends. So I'm trying out things I wouldn't have dare tried otherwise and having fun testing it out. I'm wearing more color than usual.

We're trying to focus on the positive—our new apartment, starting fresh, not being weighed down by too many belongings... But it's been hard.

This summer has felt not felt like our real life. It's been a weird mix of bad dream and vacation, both from our trip to Norway and also living in this part of town filled to the brim with vacationers snapping photos. It's a fun escape to walk around with ice cream among all the carefree tourists. I even enjoy stopping to give directions and restaurant recommendations. We've enjoyed watching the Fêtes de la Nouvelle France festival, summer fireworks, and huge cruise ships come and go daily from "our" little perch of an apartment. I suspect our friends' place will always feel like a healing refuge to us.

But this slowed-down, displaced time doesn't feel real. I can't take a vacation from our new reality: when I stop to think, everything is still there.

***

The church bell in the square rings. Is it a wedding? It looks like it: I see a car with a white bow and crowd of people gathering and taking photos. From my high vantage point I watch the bell in the steeple swing back and forth. The bell stops; there's a cheer at something I can't see.

A harpist has been playing for a while now, and on a nearby corner is a case that surely contains a piano. The pianist is nowhere to be seen; a red coat hangs on the case.

Finally I see the bride, with her veil blowing in the wind. Her bridesmaid is in maroon beside her. The bride moves out of sight, and I hear some clapping. The crowd is small now; most people dispersed shortly after the bell stopped ringing. The pianist appears and sets up his station. He places a large, red café umbrella over his piano and sits under it on his bench, ready for his allotted time to begin. He starts playing as the harpist packs up. Turns out, it's this guy that plays Pachelbel's Canon...

***

I admit I have a streak of stubbornness. About a week after the fire, we had two bananas about to go bad. I was determined to make banana bread out of them. I went to four grocery stores to get the things I needed. The three closest stores did not have what I needed (small places in a touristy area), so I also had to go to our former grocery store. It was ridiculous, really, to go to all that effort to avoid trashing those bananas, but I was determined to do something normal that I would have done in my "before life." Starting with an empty pantry, no muffin tins, etc., makes everything complicated. But I did make those muffins, and I also made the solid conditioner and body butter bars I had wanted to make before our Norway trip. It wasn't rational, but I guess it was my way to reclaim bits of normalcy.

In ten days, I hope to be immersed in creating a new normal. We'll need many basics...duvets, shower curtains, leggings, sheets, towels... We're eager to get to that phase and rebuild together. To find a sense of stability again. To heal and, one day, adopt another little cat or maybe a dog, or both. To feel safe again. To have a home again.

We will be buying a fire escape ladder. I plan to get a fire-safe box too and keep some essentials in a spot near the bed and escape ladder. I used to keep my purse by the bed, in case there was a fire or something, but at some point I decided it was a little paranoid. Turns out it was a good idea. I left the apartment during the fire with nothing. We had no money, no credit cards. Thankfully we were able to get back in the next day and everything was still there, but that could have not been the case at all. In the future, I'll be more prepared. I will also think about fire safety in the way we organize our home and arrange furniture.

And, oddly enough, during the week before the fire, I had been talking to my colleagues about how I wanted to get a rope fire-escape ladder. I had told them how my father had one for our family and kept it in the bedroom under the bed and had said that it seemed like a good idea to have one.

***

August 29, 2020. Around 1 p.m. or so.

I'm sipping on hot water as I sit in my yellow wooden desk chair at at my 1950s-era yellow dining room table, wrapped in a striped, multi-color crocheted blanket made years ago by a distant great-grandparent-level relative I don't think I ever met. As I look at the trees outside, I notice the raindrops sliding down the window, blurring the view. The upstairs neighbor is strumming his guitar, and my boyfriend is washing some pots and silverware in the kitchen.

I've been rereading this post I wrote almost two years ago. I had been planning to publish it after all the logistics related to the fire were wrapped up. I waited and waited because, due to some difficulties with the post-disaster cleaning service, we didn't wrap everything up until late August 2019. Our insurance agent was amazing, and, thanks to her, everything finally got settled. (The cleaners and movers they hired damaged quite a few things, and they did not want to compensate us.) That delay kept me feeling stuck and sad for a long time, and I just never got around to publishing this. But I've been thinking about writing again on here now and then, and I felt like I couldn't share anything else until I shared this.

Over the last year or so especially, we've been able to settle more into this new life and rebuild. We found a new normal. In July 2019, we adopted a sweet cat that we met at a shelter. His name is Leo, and he's three now. He's incredibly affectionate and very stubborn and opinionated. He also has an incredible capacity for lying on us for hours at a time (and is demanding about it), and he meows so much. He's the most talkative kitty I've ever met.

We still occasionally have moments where we are still dealing with the emotions from the fire. The other week (or month? time blurs together these days), my boyfriend woke up in the night thinking there was a fire. Last week, I was looking at photos of Slinky, trying to decide on one to print, right as fire trucks happened to rush by with their sirens on. (They go by our apartment frequently.) We have our X-IT fire escape, which I chose after reading Wirecutter and emailing with the very nice owner and inventor. And my boyfriend says he doesn't remember a lot of our trip to Norway. Apparently, our brains do that sometimes following traumatic experiences.

And, of course, there's been everything that's happened in the last almost six months as the world has turned upside and so much has changed... Time has slowed again, and I guess we're finding another new normal, but this time we're all doing it...

Going through the whole fire experience deepened my relationship with my boyfriend. We'd already been through a medical emergency together (unexpectedly almost losing my mom in the fall of 2017, when my parents were here visiting us), but the fire was another round of the "for worse" side of life. This year, we've been dealing with pandemic together, and about two and a half weeks ago, we had medical emergency, when I was scared I might lose my boyfriend. (Long story short: extremely intense migraine + stroke-like symptoms → 911, ambulance, ER, potential exposure to COVID-19 in the ER, home the same night, followed by 14 days of quarantine just in case. We're okay now.) All that to say, I'm thankful to have my boyfriend as my partner in life, through all the good and the bad.

4:02 p.m.
After taking a break, I come back to read through this again. I hear sirens and move to the window. A few seconds later, the big ladder fire truck speeds down the hill. I hear other fire trucks in the distance, with their sirens and horns. As usual, I take a moment to pause and send my prayers and thoughts toward the fire fighters and the people they are rushing to help.

Soon, it's quiet again, and I focus on the sound of the rain rebounding off the window sill and the cars' tires spraying water as they pass by on the street two stories below. The blurry trees are vibrant, even if the sky is gray.