It takes us

June 16th, 2021

17:00 pm. 

My dad was standing in front of the fireplace contemplatively. I caressed the freshly painted wall. A trace of the tangerine paint stayed on my finger.

“So it’s finally ready?” I asked,

“No,” he replies looking at me.

“What do you mean no? What else does it take to build this home?”

“It takes us.”

July 23rd, 2018

13:00 pm.

It was so hot outside. The hottest day of the summer I had ever felt. Heat sticking to your skin; almost tearing through it. I was walking along the seaside pathway which ran in front of my dad’s house. I was on my way to meet my friends. I was 16 and all I was thinking about was which boy or girl I was going to hook up with. All I was thinking about was how I looked in my new bikini and whether I should hold my towel or wrap it around my waist. 

I swam with my friends and then we played in the local beach-volley court. I remember we were telling jokes and mocking each other. Mocking at that age means constant banter as a means to get closer. It’s an excuse to playfully shove each other on the shoulder. It means pretending to hate the other person so much you start to fall in love with them. You start to hug more often and to hold hands. Finally, you cuddle on a summer night on the beach and softly kiss. You walk home smelling the jasmine flowers dancing in the breeze and think “This feeling in my chest must be what love is.” But I was only 16. I did not know what love is. 

July 23rd, 2018

15:00 pm.

I walk home with a giddy step. I am starving and dehydrated. I chug down lemonade and I notice my grandma in the garden. 

“There are some fillets in the fridge, I trust you can make them yourself?”

“Yes Gram of course I can”

“Okay, just be careful when turning on the gas!” 

I put the skillet on the fire, I add the fillet and a few leaves of sage to create a buttery-sage sauce. 

After I was done eating I sat in the living room of the house. My aunt came inside. We had the air conditioner on full to combat the wave of scolding air. We had closed the shutters on the big window to stop the sun from coming inside. We did leave a few centimeters of it open though.  

We talked for a while with my aunt, she explained how sorry she was that she was not there for me when my parents broke up. I felt a sense of relief in that moment and I felt hopeful that I would someday get closure from my parents break up. It was a bright moment for me. I am the kind of person that believes that when one door closes another one opens. I also know that life will never throw us a bone we are not able to catch. Meaning we are in any given moment more than able to handle the things that come our way, even if we come close to death, physically or emotionally or sometimes both. 

July 23rd, 2018

17:00 pm.

The leaves outside were getting swept up. The sea was charging with fierce waves. The wind came to take us all away. I was sitting on the purple sofa opposite my aunt. I glanced to my left, and I noticed the few rays of sunlight that were coming through the mostly closed shutters had turned orange. Not a transcending sunset orange. A vicious neon orange, like a warning. The wind was picking up, I could feel the branches breaking. We opened the shutters to see. My grandpa stood outside in sight of the window. We saw him get swept away like a little particle of pollen. Thankfully, he was okay. My grandma came in, we turned on the TV. On the news we saw there was a fire somewhere. Not too far from here. But not close enough either. “We are going to be fine, It’s far away.”

 One of the worst traits of humanity is our optimism bias. Thinking we are immune because in our eyes, our subjective story could never get tarnished by unforeseeable events. 

The lights fell. The air conditioner stopped. The TV turned off. 

The heat was turning up. The sky was getting more orange. It smelled of smoke. We were outside now, a neighbour screamed in the street

“THE FIRE HAS CROSSED THE HIGHWAY!”

The highway is what separated the mountains and the tiny coastal town we were in. The first reaction was to go down to the sea. We called my dad panicking. He asked which way the smoke was blowing. We said it was to the left. “Go to the car NOW and drive towards the right, I will come to meet you.”

It was a situation of total chaos. Everyone in my family seemed to have a big amount of optimism bias. My grandma was casually picking up her things. I was crying and wearing long sleeves because that is what I had heard one is supposed to do in a fire situation. I took a few clothes with me and although I am not religious, a picture of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that I always carried with me when I went from house to house. I was the last one to leave the house, with the task of locking the door. Before I left I glanced around the living room. I sat down at the piano and played a boogie song I had recently learned. A goodbye, I suppose. 

We got in the car and drove like hell. There were people driving towards the left, they passed by us as we went towards the right. I only wish I had stood out of the car window and shouted for them to follow us. It was a gamble that day. Some win, some lose. There is no optimism, just choices and outcomes. Just randomness. 

We met my dad as he promised. He was wearing a soft blue polo shirt and I just darted into his arms. I was hugging him with passion. I needed my dad. I needed him to tell me I am safe. I sobbed into his soft blue polo shirt. Lifting my head from his shirt I saw I had left stains of tears and it looked like clouds lightly touching the sky on a clear day. Turning around I saw a different scene. A huge cloud of deathly smoke, at least 30 meters high had overtaken the land. It crawled ominously across to the sea in front of it. Here I was looking at it from afar, Here I was sobbing into my dad’s shirt. Here I was in the safety of the sky. 

July 24th, 2018

13:30 pm.

They had told me over the phone. I did not believe it. I had to see it with my own eyes. It seemed the apocalypse had decided to come, but just on one spot on the whole globe. It decided to come to my little hometown. We parked the car a little further than the house is. I walked up and as soon as my eyes met the corner of the external kitchen wall I collapsed in the street. I screamed and let out a cry I could never replicate again because it was the kind of cry that can only come out when being in the face of complete desperation. The cry of being defeated. All of us walked around our house. The house that has been in our family since 1940. The house which we were created in, where we celebrated birthdays, summers, and weddings. The house my dad had all his art in and the house I spent so many nights growing in. We wept as if at a funeral, we wept as if we lost our very innocence.

Corpses of blackened trees had frozen in place. They were wrapped in thick layers of dark ash. Their flesh, burned.  

My room was ash, everything was ash. Only little fragments of plates and mugs laid in the rubble of the roof which had taken over the living room. 

It was only a few days later we would know the death toll. Not 1, not 10, but 102 people died in the Attica Wildfire on the 23rd of July 2018. I was not one of them but I did feel the emptiness one feels after a near-death experience. I felt a hollowness put there by the amount of things I had not done in my 16 years. How meaningless my life really was. How I did not even finish high school yet. How I had never truly loved like I wanted to. 

July 2019.

I stayed with my dad in the little side rooms which weren’t part of the main structure. They survived the fire. We converted one room into a kitchen and we lived everyday next to the corpse that remained on our property. 

I was almost 18. We cleared the rubble from the structure. We cut the trees. Small plants had grown all over the place. We try to make the best of a bad situation. My dad says we will rebuild it soon. I believe him. 

I feel I have lost time with him. We lost months of being together, we were torn apart. I hated having to wait till next summer to be together again. 

July 2020.

Some renovations took place over the months. The garden was getting into shape, new trees everywhere, new bushes growing with no shame. The house got a nice new white coat. It started to look alive. But though it had a bandaid I still felt the cracks inside. 

March 2021.

The new wooden roof was now in place. The skeleton finally got a pair of lungs. I was getting tired and impatient with how lifeless it was. I was getting tired knowing how many moments we have missed inside it. The final stretch is in sight. 

May 2021.

It was almost three years now. It was almost happiness now. The doors were finally in place. The bad things shut out once and for all. The breeze only comes inside when you want it to. The ash stayed out. The pain stayed out. Now there was safety. How much more can this structure endure? It still did not feel exactly like a home. The furniture was all new, a new purple couch and tables and chairs.  My dad’s new art hung in the living room. An angel made of purple and blue. It was flaming and honest. I hope it never has to feel itself burned alive.

June 16th, 2021

17:00 pm.

It was ready now. The garden was an array of chromatic bliss. New trees and a pathway surrounded a lake full of fish. The rooftop was accessible now and as my dad said “Great for a party.”

My dad led me to the bedrooms. Mine was alive, I finally felt safe to move my things there. My dad’s bedroom resurrected, he had repainted those little birds on the wall. Somehow they seemed better than before. Entering the living room I felt a weird sense of deja vu. The last time I was here I was running for my life. I was saying my goodbye to this place. I was walking away from my home knowing I would not see it again for a while. So I shouted

“Hello!” 

Looking towards the windows on the roof, I saw the sunlight. It was a beautiful canary yellow, the kind it is supposed to be on a summer day. 

My dad seemed emotional as I glanced at him. He let out a sigh. A sigh close to the sigh of total satisfaction. I think he could not believe we made it either. We both knew that our tears had watered the garden. We knew the sweat of the builders held the concrete together. We knew that our hard-earned money is what kept the lights on. So we did it in a way, we fixed it. The house was ready. 

My dad was standing in front of the fireplace contemplatively. I caressed the freshly painted wall. A trace of the tangerine paint stayed on my finger.

“So it’s finally ready?” I asked,

“No,” he replies looking at me.

“What do you mean no? What else does it take to build this home?”

“It takes us.”