You came into the bedroom saying “it smells like campfire.” Naively I replied, “I like that smell. Reminds me of summer camp.” We left the screen door open that night, and the next morning our living room was coated in a dusty, grey soot.
We didn’t know about N95 masks or fancy air purifiers. We didn’t realize that Twitter was good for more than just confirming earthquakes.
We also didn’t think that this would hurt you, after your two long years of living in Kabul before we met, when you came to me with broken lungs and a blackened heart.
Then the fires came ripping across the hillsides, a perforated line of electric red-orange rippling over the mountain’s edge tearing jagged corners from the sky.
We felt the roaring heat of incoming destruction and instinctively I realized that it was only going to get worse if we didn’t do something, anything, right now, we were those characters in a movie that had to get out, just leave, just take everything and run.
But only fictional characters do that, and this was real life.
“I want to stay,” you had said, wheezing from behind your old blue bandana. You sat on the couch next to a pile of balled up tissues, a few of them bloody.
Our cat Max sat in your arms, ears twitching but otherwise unalarmed. “The roads are clogged anyway. Our tires are going to melt. We have plenty of supplies, why don’t we just wait it out?”
I stood in the doorway mid-motion, holding a stack of clothes. I didn’t know how to respond. Was she in shock? But weren’t we all?