I walked out to my roof like every night... This time, it was different. There was a fire in the distance. A real high-flamed fire. With smoke and spirits and more flames. I knew, I knew my body was weak that day and I felt dizzy with the first puff. Vomity. I shacked, my leg did, out of control. I went out for a second time, this time with my camera. It only captured red shadows and night. Stupid amateur quality camera. I re-entered my room and light a candle. My Yankee candle reminds me of my step-grandparents step-love and it's smell... it's smell. London's burning in the distance I thought. Like the song. No, it was not London. It must have been an empty field, London is further away. I thought of the other two times when I've seen fires, one of them was in London, Camden was burning mercilessly. People gathered in the nearby park to watch, so did my friends and I, we even got to talk to some of the firemen. Some guy was smoking inside his flat, he fell asleep, they said. Everything is close and near in London, a fire like that could have consumed the whole borough.
The other fire I've seen was longer ago, before Camden, even before England. It happened in my little forest house in a valley back in Ecuador. I had a happy day that day, it was so happy that I fell asleep with excited exhaustion, holding his photograph with one hand and covering my eyes from the 3 o'clock Equatorial sun with the other. When I woke up, my house was flooded with dense smoke. I went outside and saw our four trees burning in a hellish fire. Fiercely. One of them fell over the wall that separated our house from the abandoned property next door. We had no hose. Only tiny useless buckets. I ran down the road and borrowed a hose from the neighbours and called the emergency number, then a fire engine. There was no access, from anywhere, to that bit of the forest, I've always lived in the edge between a town and a forest, I don't know why, it just happens. Forests come with a lot of spirits and stories.
I was incharged of the borrowed hose and of checking on the firemen that had to get to the fire through our garden. The more water they sprayed, the bigger the flames, the bigger the fire. My brother took the car and went to buy a bigger hose. I swear it took him what it felt like forever. I cannot also remember how long it took the firemen to put down the fire... maybe four hours... but I do remember that late that night, my brother, my friend Taya and I sat high up in the leftovers of the wall that once was (the one that the tree fell on), which by then had cooled down a little and was pleasant to sit on (not for extended periods of time though). We ended up that night putting down burnings ashes, little fires as we smoked cigarettes on the wall, trying to be one with the fire and taking turns with the brand-new-long-green hose.
It was a clear night besides the pink smokey cluds that we were creating, we could see the stars. The smell of burnt forrest that we liked so much at first began to make us sick. No on knew what will happen on the next day. One thing we did know, and that was that we did not have our four extremely tall trees anymore. That made my grandma happy, she thinks fire is Always a good thing and that those trees were threatening with falling on top of the actual house (which would have been completely crushed by even just one of them). We used to have five, one of them fell on another wall. It was such a mess. I don't remember having seen my mother at all that day, later on she told me how she she thought someone had started that fire on purpose and that she knew who it was. Someone who didn't like her and had access to that bit of the forrest, it made sense. Then we feared. She feared for Kanito our dog, who hungs out in the garden most of the time. She is always worrying about the dogs.
The candle has stolen all the air in my room. My body feels all weak again. I really need some sleep. I really do. Good night.
