Smoke

By the time I awoke- alarm trilling, smoke polluting the air, oppressive heat, and everything muffled- it was already too late. The air was still clear enough to crawl my way out, but the house was already ashes. I remember standing there in my childhood bedroom as smoke filled the air, choking as it latched onto my lungs, and realising I still had time to save something. But what could I save, really? The books, so many and so heavy I could never carry them all? My CDs, my childhood toys, an accumulation of years that wouldn’t fit into my pocket. All these relics piled up and watching me in desperation as the fire licked us. And all suddenly replaceable. Did I need any of it? Was there anything to save?

The fear choked me more than the smoke. Paralysed with indecision, I needed to leave but was held back by an urgent desire to find just one piece of this home to take with me. I left singed and empty-handed, with just one glance back at the baggage I’d clung to for years, and I made my way out, joined my parents outside and watched the final flickering embers of the only home we'd ever had.

I am remembering all this now as climate catastrophes, pandemics, mismanaged governments, the creation of artificial worlds, and the ever-present, ever-distant threat of nuclear war cover everything I once loved with smoke. The threats are real, but somehow only manageable as hypotheticals. It’s such a claustrophobic realisation- if the button is pressed, it’s already too late. Wherever we are, unaware, unsuspicious, and lazy in our everyday, we will die with nowhere to run. As we struggle through everyday waters of break- ups, dentist appointments, coffees, and meetings, we may well incomprehensibly be running late to our graves. I am wondering if the earth that we have lived and loved on can still be our home. I am wondering if there is anything left to save.

I look at it and despair. The earth we grew up on, that civilisations were built and destroyed on, has become so unfamiliar. Another animal extinct, another forest struck down, they drill and drill, punching only scars into the earth, pulling oil out as if that’s all it’s good for. It is such a ravaged world now, so full of holes and ghosts without a place to haunt. I think about that old home still, how it smoked up bright orange and then crumbled black, its ashes like crumpled sandcastles in the place it had so proudly stood. I’d like to haunt it, but there’s nothing left.

Words from books come back to me, warbled by time; books I’d loved but left behind to shrivel up in flames. They whisper to me through the years, made unfriendly by time, and by the fact I’d left them to burn. Graham Swift’s Waterland-“To fix the zenith is to contemplate decline”. We can no longer read history as an ever-soaring trajectory towards something better, a march of progress, and if we must pick a point of zenith, then the years after unspool, trail off, burn up like smoke. History is not a neat tale with a happy ending. It never has been. But it hurts for the illusion to shatter with such finality. And when George Eliot said “we could never have loved the world so well if there had been no childhood in it”...I continue to look for the same flowers I loved, I look for bees, and running deer, badgers and water voles, birds and butterflies. I look for children on playgrounds, but the sun burns much harsher now, and the children sit texting in the shade. It feels like a different world.

I feel I’ve slipped on a curtain somewhere, stumbled, and the whole performance has been unveiled as a sham. The snow was always just paint, everyone only ever said their lines, it was all a show they put on and now I’m grown up all there’s left to do is clap.

Maybe I’m just tired, maybe the world is on fire and the smoke is catching at my throat, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll just let myself burn with it. We could drop our bags off at the door, sit down as if beside a campfire, and tell stories of how it was, how it should’ve been, and how the earth no longer can be. Oh, but maybe there is still hope, still birdsong, still springtime, still sunrises and sunsets, still stars if we squint through all the light pollution. Maybe there still is a sort of terror in me that the world is worth saving- the exhausting exhilarating idea that it’s still worth something after all this time. There could still be the first hot sip of mulled wine in winter, the Christmas lights twinkling up my childhood high street when I go home, and my parents' still radiant smiles. Maybe I could still crawl back to that old, loved house and rescue it from the flames.

I’m so indecisive, but maybe it’s already too late.