Strange, isn't it? how they always teach you what to do when there is a fire in your home at school, yet you seem to forget as flames devour the world around you. How one small spark could eventually engulf a home in flames. How it could happen instantaneously. How it could soon burn and desroy everything its hungry flickering lips can touch. How when it looks so breathtaking, it's striking fear into your very core, sending your mind into a frenzy where you don't know what's real or what's not. How you don't know if the screams you hear are your own or someone else's. How fire can take someone's life so easily. But like i said before, when in the presence of a hungry fire, you foreget these things. Yeah, sometimes we forget a lot of things. Sometimes, on of the most important things of all.

The sad thing is, that everything after the fire, you will never forget. Or at leas I never did. People always said I would, and it would just become on of those dark things in my past, never to dwell on again. But it never went away. The worried glances form my mother and father as they waited for a fireman to come running out with theri little boy in his arms. THe cries that escaped our mouths as a flmaing fireball crashed through his beroom window. THe pain that we all had to bear when news came that it was too late. Oh they'd found him all right. Backed up into a corner in his closet, flames claiming every inch of his body as if he were a meal.

This day always replays itself in my dreams. I would often wake to my own screams telling my little brother to get out and run. I figure there's no point in forgetting, where does it get you? I see it only as a state of ignorance, forgetting is for stupid people. But still, sometimes I would rather be stupid than have to live with a contant paoin of how I could never help my brother do anything. Not teaching him how to swim, my bad heart prevented me from doing any sport. Not from the 'monster in the closet' I crawled into his bed when i got scared. And certainly not getting him out of the fire. I forgot he was there.

The Sorrow. The loss. The guilt. These things I will never forget. I mean, how could I see it any other way? It was my fault. We were in the same room, the same time. The fire should have claimed my life. Why didn't it? That, I'd have to say, certainly is strange.