Fire has long been a powerful symbol. Used in stories, poems, songs, fables, myths, art, and all manner of human expression – fire appears in an endless number of ways. Sometimes fire is depicted as a destructive force of nature; or as a method of cleansing/purifying; or as a terrorizing weapon of war (ala the Third Punic War); or as a life-giving fuel for innovation/civilization; or any combination thereof. Some anthropologists, namely Richard Wrangham of Harvard have argued that human beings actually BECAME human by mastering the use of fire – that early hominids only made the jump to humanity through taming fire. While this theory is still hotly (pun intended) debated – it certainly shines a light on one of the most pivotal and complex relationships that human beings have – with the pure energetic and unpredictable element of fire. We certainly benefit from it – but it can also really mess us up!

For myself, fire has been an unspoken theme in one way or another throughout my life. At times it has been horrible and terrifying, and others it has served as a purifying blaze that made my pathway forward possible. As a child, my dad was an insurance claims adjustor. As a result, I often heard risk analysis as if it were scientific fact. We weren’t allowed to put our arms out of open car windows just in case a semi truck drove past to whack it off (your dominant arm is only worth about 200K if you have a great policy – see below for why I know that tidbit); fireworks that flew into the air weren’t allowed on our 4th of July celebration because they might land on someone’s roof and engulf it in flames, etc. etc. So I always had a healthy appreciation for what was dangerous and what activities should be avoided. Fire was obviously included in the list (along with crazed amputation-hungry semi trucks). However, we had a fireplace and were taught early on that although it could be a dangerous element; when controlled fire was useful and safe when treated the right way.

The block that I grew up on had a lot of storm-related power outages when I was young. Candlelight was a staple in being able to clean up the flooding basement, hook up the generator to the sump pump or the refrigerator, or just to be able to see while we waited the hours/days for ComEd to restore our power. To this day, I have an abundant hoard of Bath & Body Works candles on hand. My “closet of shame” has an entire shelf of candles that are my “candle backups” that sit waiting for their opportunity to be needed. The closet only contains extras as each room already has it’s own supply in current use and “on deck candles”.

In reality my life experiences have included a wide variety of both literal and metaphorical flames; but none as physically dangerous as the one I experienced in college. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I rented a house off-campus with several friends. On February 3, 2001, a stupid argument/incident caused a rift within our house. As a result, the most important friendships that I had had in my life up to that point fractured. Two of the roommates moved out suddenly and another went home for the semester to heal from the situation. Left in the house were just myself and my roommate Justin. We started to look for an additional roommate to help pay the rent (mid-semester when very few people are looking to move). It was a crushing blow to me. My entire life I had struggled to have long-term meaningful friendships. I had always felt like I was a “side friend” in most of the groups that I had been a part of. I had several close friends in high school but even those friendships would wax and wane throughout the years. The group that I had met my freshman year of college had finally felt like they would be my “crew for life”, the “long term friends” that I had always craved. The break up of our little house was defeating to me. I went into a pretty deep depression. The boyfriend that I was madly in love with at the time was living 6 hours away in Cincinnati and couldn’t be with me more than once every 4-6 weeks; all but one of my friends had left; and my close friend and dorm-roommate from the previous 2 years was studying abroad in France for the year. I thought that the first two weeks of February was the loneliest that I’d even been. Until Valentine’s Day that year. Around midnight on February 14th 2001, the shitty early-1900’s house we were renting caught on fire while Justin and I were getting ready for bed.

Being in a fire is NOTHING like what you see in TV or in the movies. It’s not this loud siren-level smoke alarm that you immediately recognize as trouble. You don’t calmly run to the phone and call the fire department and grab the family photos and the pets and briskly walk out the door as the fireman simultaneously pull into the driveway and put the fire out in less than 5 minutes. At least that was not what my experience was. I was washing my face and brushing my teeth in the bathroom getting ready for bed around midnight on a Sunday night. With the bathroom door closed, I heard the faint beeping of the smoke alarm but it sounded very far away and I thought it was a part of the music that Justin was listening to downstairs. (During a real fire the smoke alarm sounds WAY more quiet than it sounds when it’s going off due to low battery at 3 am in your silent house) So I finished up what I was doing and opened the bathroom door to see smoke billowing towards me from my bedroom at the end of the hall. I ran TOWARDS the fire to see what was going on and saw the room engulfed. I yelled downstairs to Justin and he brought up the fire extinguisher. We quickly emptied that extinguisher plus the additional one from the kitchen. I remember being overtaken by adrenaline while we fought the fire with a couple of buckets of water and both fire extinguishers before it got pitch black and impossible to breathe.

Eventually, we went downstairs, grabbed the crappy 90’s portable phone, called 911 and stood outside in the snow barefoot for what felt like forever. We tried going back in a couple of times with some stupid attempts at putting water on the fire to slow it down, but the last time had to be taken out by the firemen. I got carried out by a stereotypically “cute young fireman” (who barely looked older than myself), and stood out there in the snow crying like an idiot. At the time, I was blind as a bat (pre-LASIK) and couldn’t even see what was happening as I had left my glasses in the bathroom. I begged the firemen to try to go and find them and somehow they did. The frames were a little damaged but I was at least able to clearly see my life literally going up in smoke. Sidenote – there was no cute dog in a coat and a hat to comfort me. Another let down of the in-reality fire experience…..

I have vague memories of the college emergency dean coming to the house and giving us letters excusing us from class to give to our professors. I remember calling my boyfriend in Cincinnati frantically and him making the 6 hour drive in 4.5 to come and be with me and help me. I remember my parents coming down to help and taking me to Target to get an outfit since all I had were the pajamas I had been wearing. But the thing that I remember the most was after the whirlwind of the first few days feeling extremely alone. Maybe for the first time in my entire life I felt truly alone. My boyfriend had gone back to Cincinnati, Justin was staying with friends, and I was at a hotel off-campus until I ran out of money. I was on a waiting list for an emergency dorm room but definitely spent some very cold February nights in my car in a parking garage. The friends that I’d recently lost didn’t even know about the fire until they read about it in the Daily Illini. At first, I felt like the fire had destroyed my entire reality. But slowly and methodically I started using the experience as fuel. I credit that ordeal with beginning my lifelong and deep-seeded desire to survive in spite of adversity. I trudged forward then and I have trudged forward in the face of all forms of adversity since. At the end of that tumultuous semester I ended up with straight A’s for the first time in my academic career. And I did it totally on my own. Despite the challenges, I had slogged through the worst experience of my life (to that point) successfully. Now that decades of distance and time have passed – I feel like that was one of the first opportunities that I had in my life to stand on my own two feet. While at the time I thought that the fire had destroyed my life – it had actually cleared the way for me the way a brush fire clears the land for new crops.

Soot and ash enrich the soil for farmers. It’s why seasonal crop/brush fires are used to clear the land – to purge the toxins and renew the earth for new growth. At the time I didn’t realize that the fire was clearing the way for me to be truly independent, but in retrospect it was. I have had other metaphorical “fires” in my life since. Some set by myself and my own decisions, and some set by others that tore through my life in either productive or destructive ways – sometimes both.

Fires have different reasons for igniting. Sometimes they are difficult to build and don’t want to stay lit – the wood is wet or the wind is blowing in the wrong direction and it seems like all of the kindling and all of the stoking in the world just won’t keep the flames going. Sometimes lightning or a spark hits dry brush and an inferno is raging immediately. Sometimes coals heat up slow and hot and keep a fire at a low grade simmer for what seems like forever. The major metaphorical fires that have burned their way through my life have all had different starts. My house burning down in college was definitely a lightning strike. It was unexpected, scary, tumultuous, and turned my life (which already was at a low point that month) upside down. But in the long run – it forced me into changes that I wouldn’t otherwise have made. It also gave me the skills to empathize with students that I’ve taught over the years. I know how to survive living in a car if I have to. I know how to make $250 (mind you this was 2001 dollars) last for half a semester. I learned how to live with LESS and learn the difference between a want and a need in a very real, very quick way.

If you’ve never been in a fire or a flood – the way that the whole recovery/insurance process works is that a company comes and empties the accident site of all of your belongings. The people that did my fire recovery was ServePro. I can’t say enough about how amazing these individuals were to me. I was living in Urbana and they were based out of Rantoul. So I would go to class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until about 3 PM; then schlep over to the ServPro warehouse in Rantoul and sort my items one by one until they closed at 6:30. (This process took weeks – and it was only the stuff that I had with me at college not everything that I’d ever owned!) You put all of your worldly possessions into 3 piles: Trash (can’t be repaired), Clean (maybe it’s salvageable and maybe it isn’t but you wont be able to tell until it’s cleaned), and Salvage (clean and keep). It’s not until you go through every piece of paper, sock, pair of underwear, clothes hanger, and random bric-a-brac that you own that you realize how much you really HAVE – and how pointless most of it is.

Even now, more than 20 years later I can’t stand being in a space that’s overly cluttered. It makes me feel tense and like the walls are closing in on me. I can’t stand being surrounded by junk. I purge things often and crave open space. A major issue within my relationship with my ex-husband before we got married was his “hoard”. He “collected” (in the language of males the word “collection” really means “hoard”) DC comics stuff, Batman stuff, Catwoman stuff, HeMan, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and comics – SO MANY HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS OF COMICS!! We had 2, 2-bedroom apartments during the entirety of our 10+ year relationship and I barely entered his “room” because it was wall to wall JUNK. Even the closet was stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes and boxes of STUFF. Totally unusable storage space. The sight of it gave me miniature anxiety attacks. Below is a picture of a fraction of his hoard AFTER more than half of it had been sold. Each shelf was at least 15 items deep and this is less than 1/3 of what he had – just wall to wall PLASTIC that held very little actual meaning. I hated to look at it but tolerated it because he loved it and I loved him. But I felt an internal cleansing when I sold it all when we separated. It was like I could breathe in my own space again; like an anchor had been lifted off of my chest. I could finally SEE the walls and the floor and move more than one or two steps without hitting a “collectible” aka JUNK.

Recently I started working at a new school. The office that I moved into had it’s own hoard of files, papers, random items, etc. that I have been slowly working my way toward cleaning. Unlike the office I had at my previous school, there is at least a window to the hallway so that I can see out in addition to having space to move and work. As I purge all of my predecessor’s unneeded things from the closet and shelves I feel like I am clearing the “brush” with a controlled burn and am enriching the soil on my new path. Open and clean space calms me more than I ever realized before losing everything in a fire and starting over.

Not every metaphorical fire in my life was sudden like a lightning strike, nor purposeful and cleansing like moving into a new office. The fire that would eventually blow up my marriage was more like the coals of a charcoal grill. Slowly burning things below the surface without me even noticing the heat until a couple of events blasted lighter fluid onto it and things quickly got out of control. Now that I’m through the other side of it all and have had time to live and reflect and heal – I can see that the way things went down actually reset my life and made room for me to build my future – but at the time all I felt was the scorching heat of the flames and was choking from the fallout/smoke.

My relationship with my ex-husband was nothing if not unique. We “met” in the Q101 chat room on AOL in 1994. The first thing that Morbidgal and DeadRabies ever talked about was music. 14 year-old him private messaged 14 year-old me because I was the first person that he’d ever heard of who liked both Type O Negative and Screeching Weasel. Our first conversation was about how Bark Like a Dog was the greatest Pop Punk album to ever come out (definitely still in the Top Ten). I was from the South Suburbs and he was from the Northwest Suburbs – in the time of dial up internet, pre-driving, and long-distance phone bills we may as well have lived on opposite sides of the planet. Both of us got in trouble for the astronomical bills we ran up with our dial-up internet and phone conversations. The entire time we were in high school, he was always referring to a mysterious “Master Plan” for his life. He never went into detail but always implied that it was “something big”. When his band(s), Break of Day and The Prospects played at the Fireside Bowl in 1997, I skipped school to get to the city and be able to meet him in person. Like a loser, I was too scared to talk to him and watched the show and left. 20 years later he still didn’t believe that I was there. We wouldn’t actually meet in person for another 5 years in 2002.

In September of 1998, when I was a freshman at U of I, he called me asking for my college address. In October, I got a letter from him explaining that his “Master Plan” was finally coming to fruition. He was moving to California and wanted me to run away with him. While it seemed horribly romantic – at the time, I didn’t even know him in person. I also didn’t realize then that I was smart (my high school was INCREDIBLY hard – harder than either of my graduate degrees); so I didn’t even think getting accepted into any other colleges or transferring would be possible. (Side note: I also didn’t know University of Illinois was a good school – I thought it was super subpar and just an average state school that was really easy to get into) So, I called his mom’s house to try to find out the details about when he was leaving so that I could at least meet him in person and say goodbye before he left – and maybe see if I could figure out a way to join him the next semester. But by the time I called his mom’s house he was already gone. I assumed he would be out of my life forever and moved on. I met who I thought was going to be the love of my life and had a 5+ year relationship with him. He and I broke up right after Christmas of 2002.

2002 was my first year of teaching in my own classroom. AOL was dying it’s slow death, and was becoming an unnecessary expense. My dad told me to save all of my stuff so he could delete all the accounts and stop paying for it. I sat in Room #105 on my desktop during my planning period, logged in and started to delete all my emails, write down important email addresses, and save some files. And there it was – an email from DeadRabies – like a lightning strike. “I have no idea if you still use this address. I don’t know if your phone number is the same. I’m back in Illinois. My band is playing a show close to where you used to live on Thursday – please come.” I had recently broken up with the man I thought I was going to marry and had no plans – so I went. And thus began our non-virtual relationship. We dated on and off for a few years before we eventually moved in together in 2010. Between 2002 and 2010 we were on-again, off-again. He was a punk musician – he sewed plenty of wild oats. But when we decided to move in together he had settled down, become a health nut, stopped drinking, and was functionally employed. Things were good. But in reality the coals had already started to ignite and I didn’t notice. We knew each other for 20+ years in some form or another. We lived together for 10 years before getting married. And things ended in a few gigantic “flashbombs” that were actually just squirts of lighter fluid on the hot coals that had been smoldering for years right underneath me.

Fast forward to our wedding in March of 2019. We had gotten engaged in July of 2018 on the roof of the St. James Hotel in San Diego. It made sense to me that he’d want to propose in the place he’d once asked me to run away with him to. He even mentioned the Master Plan while we were there on the roof. We went to multiple punk bars and got free shots for getting engaged. We got tattoos from Pappy McCall at Tahiti Felix’s. Life was good. Sorta.

Unbeknownst to me, the briquettes were slowly getting hotter. We moved forward and planned the wedding. We chose a venue, decided on a menu, made a guest list. The one decision that we agonized over the most was the music. We eventually chose a fantastic DJ (Chris Brower – just hire him!) because music was a major part of our relationship and we needed a person who GOT us (I love that we’re still on his Instagram and that to HIM our story was only ever joyful).

Then in December of 2018 a blast of lighter fluid hit. My mom was hit head on by a texting teenager. She broke her neck in a “hangman’s fracture”. She’s damn lucky she wasn’t killed or paralyzed. But that by no means meant things were easy. She was in a HORRIBLE brace. She couldn’t lay down and had to sleep in this brace that could’ve also doubled as a Medieval Torture Device. She needed all sorts of help. She couldn’t bathe herself, eat easily, sleep, etc. She was deeply depressed and it was hard on us all. At her lowest point, when she was in the hospital, she cried and asked if we could move the March wedding back. She felt sad she wouldn’t be able to help me do anything to really prepare for it. She’d looked forward to the experience of planning my wedding for a long time and it nearly killed her that she couldn’t help the way that she wanted to. She was worried she couldn’t look nice and wouldn’t be out of the brace in time. That was a pretty dark and depressing Christmas for my family. My mom, the Queen of Christmas Spirit didn’t get to spend Christmas making a spectacular and fancy meal or decorating happily – instead she spent the holidays as you see her below. The entire guest list of my wedding in March of 2019 was thrilled to see her braceless and nearly unassisted and looking great as she defiantly walked down the aisle at my wedding. She was like a mighty warrior phoenix that day and I was ecstatic to be able to share the attention with her alive and upright.

Before: Mom’s Christmas Spirit 2018

After: Mom Kicking Ass March 2019.

One burst of lighter fluid down – several more to go. Two months after our wedding; my ex-husband was hit by a pickup truck as a pedestrian. I got a call at about 4 am from a hospital that there had been an accident but it was the weekend and their hospital didn’t have an emergency surgeon on call. They stated that he was “not critically wounded but will need a surgical procedure” and they even put him on the phone briefly with me before he was transported. We only had about a 5-second conversation where I asked him “What happened? Oh my god are you ok?” and he said “Please don’t freak out or I’ll freak out. Just come. They’re making me hang up the ambulance is here.” Since he had spoken to me and they made it seem like he just needed some sort of minor surgery – I quickly got dressed and flew to the University of Chicago and arrived around 5 am without calling anyone. Around 5:45 they pulled me into a private room and explained that his arm had almost been amputated and he was in surgery (and that amputation wasn’t off the table yet). They started talking to me about prosthetics and all sorts of other scary things. Cue the lighter fluid because I thought he just needed some extensive stitches or staples when I’d arrived and was shocked and alone. I hadn’t even been married two months and I was being told I might have to be choosing prosthetics for my husband (I wasn’t even used to calling him my husband yet). They rushed me upstairs to the emergency surgery waiting area. The surgeon came out of the operating suite and told me I had no time to deeply think or deliberate and that he needed an answer in 2 minutes. He told me he could guarantee that he could save my husband’s life easily and amputate right now, or try to save the arm and make no guarantees either way. He was a gifted guitar-player and it was his dominant arm (later I’d find out those are only worth about $200k). So I told him to try to save it. A miracle happened and the doctor saved both the arm and hand; nor did it die in the next critical 72 hours. He had movement but a gruesome and long road ahead of him.

Obviously after a traumatic injury like that you’re going to be in the hospital for quite some time. After his 4th or 5th surgery on May 31st (ironically the day that our wedding pictures were delivered in the mail and waiting for me on the porch when I got home); I got to meet his mistress. She came to surprise him at the hospital. Turns out he’d been living a double-life and had been with her for 3 years BEFORE we got engaged. LIGHTER FLUID. He and I fought about it – obviously. He took me off the approved visitor’s list at the hospital. I wasn’t even allowed updates as to whether or not he was alive. I was DESTROYED like Carthage.

Then the phone calls from bill collectors started. (MORE LIGHTER FLUID). His secret life had included stealing small amounts of money per month from my checking account (we never had any joint accounts ever). He was using the $40-$80 a month to pay minimum balances on credit cards he’d taken out in my name and run up tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt in my name. Now I find out I’d been humiliated, traumatized, and was also broke and in big debt. (All while starting a brand new school administration job at a turnaround school). When he was finally released from the hospital in late June he went to his mom’s house. He begged for forgiveness. I told him to leave me alone because I had no idea if any of it was ever going to be forgivable. He responded by attempting suicide and being admitted to a psychiatric hospital. (BURN BABY BURN!)

In the meantime, I did what I needed to do (sold everything and took out a loan) to pay off all of the debt. But I was afraid to file for divorce because we were legally married – and if he DID kill himself or die – any debt that he had in his own name could become my responsibility and then I’d be right back to square one (6 figures in debt). Due to his arm injuries, they had to transport him back and forth to the regular hospital for his arm checkups. After I refused to take his calls on the morning of one of these transports, he tried to “escape” by trying to jump out of the moving ambulance and fucking up his other arm. More surgeries.

Once he was out of the hospital – the unhinged behaviors, scary texts, stalking behaviors, and threats – mixed in with frantic pleading for another chance and wild declarations of love – became relentless. He’d text me all day; call and leave rambling and frightening voicemails all night. (Duplicate texts that I’m sure that “Lady Hoebags” was also getting from him in his attempt to get one of us to forgive him so he’d have a place to live once his mom finished moving to the land her and her boyfriend had bought in Nevada). Needless to say I couldn’t even see straight from how tired I was. I was too afraid to leave my phone on silent all night in case something happened; but it rang constantly.

On August 31st our lease was up. I had already moved away and the last time I saw him in person was when he came to get the last of his things. When he left with the U-Haul he was still begging for forgiveness out of one side of his mouth while being threatening to me out of the other side. (Even though he had already starting reconciling with his mistress). At the end of September, I felt confident enough that he wasn’t going to kill himself or die; so I filed for divorce. He didn’t show up for court, didn’t hire an attorney, didn’t return my lawyer’s calls and hid. We had to hire marshals to serve him with his papers. My divorce was final on April 9, 2020. I was separated and alone for more months of my marriage than I was physically with my husband. We only lived together as “husband and wife” from March 23rd-May 18th (the night of his accident). The bursts of lighter fluid between my mom’s accident and his suicide attempts, betrayals, and accident made the coals flare several times. But in reality, once I found out all of the layers of the truth I realized that our entire relationship had been a mirage that I was always viewing through a haze of smoke.

A lot of support from my closest friends, a forensic accountant, a crisis therapist, a wonderful mentor, and working relentless hours at a Turnaround School got me through the worst of it. I persevered through a mix of stubbornness, spite, and pure grit. Seeing all of this typed out in print it all seems ridiculous or like it wasn’t actually real. Sometimes when I look back on it all it feels like I’m watching someone else’s life and not my own. But now, I laugh about a lot of it. Now my life is probably the most amazing that it has EVER been. I am working at a great job in a great school district and am FINALLY confidant in my skills as an educator. My money is more under control than it’s been since 3 years before my marriage. (I am 15 measly months away from being 100% debt free and am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel caused by Senor Dickhead). I have recreated and reinvented myself and am stronger than I ever thought that I could be. I started dating and (fingers crossed) have met an incredible man who treats me better than anyone I have ever been with before. For maybe the first time in my entire life I am happy and relatively at peace. The Romans tried to scorch my earth and tried to salt it after they left – but I persisted and am growing anyway. Unlike when I was in college; this time I didn’t do it all on my own. But the confidence and skills I learned from my first fire prepared me for the resilience I would need to overcome the scorched earth that was my marriage.

Ironically, several weeks after my house burned down – my roommate Justin and I went out for Chinese food. For as unbelievable as it is, the fortune from my fortune cookie from that dinner is still in my bedroom all these years later. (I recently got new carpet and when they moved the furniture I couldn’t find it for a few minutes and thought it was lost and nearly had a panic attack – but it was just hiding under my jewelry box.)

Like most former goth/punk kids – Charles Bukowski has always had a special place in my heart. For as problematic of a man he may have been – he makes a great point: “What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.” If mankind’s greatest achievement was taming fire – then maybe it takes us a lot of tries to learn how to control the blazes that we encounter so that they create productive and fertile futures. In the end, I’ve learned that sometimes it’s better to burn it all down and start fresh with only the things that really matter and not all the “clutter” that we jam pack into our lives. Crops can’t grow when their roots are choked. Ash doesn’t have to choke us – it can fertilize the ground for what we actually need. Control the blaze the best you can and take only what you need with you; but be prepared for the occasional blast of lighter fluid or lightning strike and don’t let it take you by surprise and burn you at the stake unprepared. And when it gets hard – make the best of it. Like the lady in the painting in my bathroom.