What Is That Bright Orange Glow?
Posted By Kristabella on April 9, 2008
I am a sleeper. I’m pretty sure my mom won’t read the rest of this and will just jump down to comment and be like “yes! You were the kid who WANTED to go to bed!” And she’ll laugh and tell embarrassing stories and then I’ll delete her comments. Kidding. (Maybe.)
But yeah, my life revolves around sleep. I would prefer to get 10-12 hours of sleep a night, if I could. And on the weekends, I usually do just that. When I was a kid, I always went to bed BEFORE my mom asked me. If we were at family functions, I pestered my mom and whined that we had to leave NOW, or I wouldn’t get enough sleep. I was constantly calculating the hours in my head until I would potentially have to be up because I NEED A LOT OF SLEEP.
Even today if I mention to my Grandma that I’m tired she’ll tell me “you were born tired.” Fo Sizzle, Gram.
I swear this post isn’t going to be a snooze fest about snoozing.
As much as I love sleep, I’m not really a heavy sleeper. I hear things in the night that will wake me up, like my cat sliding across the hardwood floor on her nails at 2 AM and then slamming into the wall. I also sleep with a fan on because I can’t fall asleep if I have no white noise. I NEVER sleep well at other people’s houses or in hotels because I start listening to every little thing and then THAT IS ALL I CAN FOCUS ON. Like the ceiling fan in my room that is constantly taunting me with its rhythmic TICK, TICK, TICK all summer long.
Which brings us to today’s story. Are you still awake? My fan is kind of loud. It is a small fan that sits on my nightstand, but as far as fans go, it is pretty loud. That’s how I like it. And why I’ve had it for too many years and it will probably crap out on me the minute I hit publish on this post. It kind of blocks out a lot of the background noise that I deal with living in the city. A city with a lot of drunks.
Back when I was living in California, my last summer there, I was awoken to a beeping noise outside my window. Because I lived on the first floor, I actually didn’t keep my windows open at night, except for the one window in the bathroom. Because it was a little window and I apparently thought I was safe because I could totally take on any skinny burglar that could fit their ass through that window.
Anyway, I woke up to this weird beeping. It kind of sounded like a fire alarm, but it was moving. Loud sometimes, very faint at others. I checked all the smoke detectors in my house and they weren’t the culprit. I checked the radios, the TV, all the electrical appliances. That beeping was NOT coming from inside my house. Since I was intrigued AND awake, I decided to open the blinds on the sliding glass door in the kitchen which looked out to the parking lot.
Well, what I saw was the LAST thing I was expecting to see. The building that was just on the other side of my apartment building, about 50 yards away from my door, was on FIRE! And not just a tiny fire, the building was ENGULFED IN FLAMES! SMOKE EVERYWHERE!
I fucking flipped out! There were fire trucks everywhere! My car was covered in soot. This was a BIG DEAL! I immediately turned on the news and there the local new station was, blocks from my house, reporting on the FOUR-ALARM FIRE that was steps from my house! FOUR ALARM! I thought people only talked about that when it came to chili!
I put on a sweatshirt and went outside to see what the scoop was. I walked out there, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, and attempted to talk to my neighbors that I had never met. Nothing brings people together like escaping getting burned to death. So I moseyed on up to a nice looking group of young people and asked the simple question of “what’s going on?”
Their response? “Did you just wake up? DID YOU SLEEP THROUGH A FOUR-ALARM FIRE?”
I meekly responded that yes, yes I did. They were convinced that my apartment was on the other side of the complex because that is the only reasonable thing that could explain someone sleeping through a DIESEL ENGINE FROM A FIRE TRUCK RATTLING THEIR WALLS. Oh, AND THE SIRENS!
“No,” I responded. “I’m the apartment right there on the corner, right there near that blaze. That’s my formerly white car that is now covered in ash.”
They didn’t say much to me then. Because clearly I was psycho or from ANOTHER PLANET because who sleeps through a fire? Aliens, that’s who.
Thankfully it was an electrical fire or something and the building was completely empty at that time. And I’m also thankful that the wind was not really blowing and that when it did blow, it was in the OPPOSITE direction of my apartment. Because who knows what would have happened then.
Instead, I was just lucky enough to get the smell of ash and all things burning blown in my face every time I turned on the air conditioning for the rest of that summer.
