where there's smoke...

it’s 1:45 in the morning and i’ve just made myself a drink. an hour ago, i was asleep. why am i awake, you ask? is it insomnia? bad dreams? nervousness about this weekend’s client counseling competition? no, no, and no.

the reason i’m awake right now – wide a-fucking-wake – is that i just about damn near burned my house down tonight. but lemme back up and give the play-by-play…

i went to bed around 10:45 and was probably asleep a little after 11:00. hooray, i thought! i’ll get up at 6:00 and will have gotten seven hours of sleep! good for me! little did i know that something had started that would interfere with my shut-eye. fast-forward to 1:00. i wake up because i hear a loud noise upstairs at michael & steph’s place. and then my phone rings. it’s michael. the conversation goes like this:

emily: hey—what’s going on?
michael: there’s a fire outside your window?
emily: what the fuck? oh shit, i just dropped my glasses…
michael: i’m standing outside your door.
emily: i’ll be right there.

so i find my glasses, run into the living room, open the door for michael, and sure enough, there’s a fire on the roof outside my living room window, where the plastic cat litter container full of dirt and old cigarette butts used to be. you see, over the summer, when i had a little makeshift garden on my windowsill, i had attempted to grow little pumpkins. and i used an old cat litter tub as the receptacle for the pumpkin-growing. yeah, yeah, i know that the size and shape of cat litter containers aren’t exactly well-suited for viney, leafy pumpkins, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. and so when the weather got cooler, and the garden was dismantled, the plastic container kinda stayed on the roof and became where i dumped all the soil from the other plants. and that then became a glorified ashtray for all the nights when i’d sit on my windowsill and smoke.

and i guess tonight, when i finished my windowsill cigarette, i didn’t do a good enough job of making sure the cigarette was completely put out in the dirt.

the facts are as follows: somebody had been walking by outside on the street and saw the fire on the roof, so they rang michael and steph’s doorbell. the loud noise i heard that initially woke me up was steph stomping on the floor to get my attention. so when michael came downstairs and i let him in, it immediately became a matter of only-emily-and-michael-can-prevent-roof-fires. michael filled up a pitcher with water and i grabbed a fire extinguisher and we set out to make sure that the flames were all gone. and after a dramatic, traumatic few minutes of dousing-with-water, culminating with michael climbing outside to make sure that all the burning had ceased, michael, steph, and i had successfully made sure that our house did not burn down.

and now, i’m in my living room, fan in the window in an attempt to clear out all the smoke that has filled my apartment, cats running around all confused and crazy-like. i feel overwhelmed by the following, in no particular order:
shock
horror
embarrassment
gratefulness.

this could have been very bad. i literally could have burned the house down. there was a smoldering cigarette busy for two hours in that container outside my window! what if someone hadn’t walked by and seen it? what if the fire had gone on longer than it did? what if we had lost our stuff, our home, our lives???

i feel like an idiot. i feel like a cliché – single woman nearly burns down home with cigarette. ah, the gross negligence!!! i pretty much owe michael and steph a life debt, and i’m not sure how i’m going to present this little experience to my landlord (this is what security deposits are for, right? and the thing about how my smoke detector never went off, not even when my apartment looked like the inside of a cloud? yeah – i’ll mention that, too.)… but i truly am grateful to the kindness of strangers, the helpfulness of friends, and to a close-call-reminder that i really don’t need to be smoking anymore.