How to Survive a Burning House by Sam Holmes

Sean Benham CC




How to Survive a Burning House

       Our main goal here is survival.

      In order to survive a burning house, you need to recognize when it’s burning and where. Is it in the kitchen? The bedroom? The hallway, or all three? When you’re a kid, you won’t know much about fire. You won’t know how it spreads, what to do, or just how detrimental it can be. The important part of this first step is that you need to have this moment of recognition when you’re young. About ten or eleven. 
      I was only able to recognize my house was burning because someone told me it was. You need to remember that because you grew up in the burning house, you won’t know that it is on fire until you step outside and see all the other houses on the street still standing. This is the most important step.
      After you realize your house is burning, you’ll need to come up with an escape plan; a survival effort. Now, because you’re young and because your parents didn’t provide you with the tools to be able to survive outside and inside of your house, you will feel very lost. So when you start to feel very lost and the burns from the flames grow larger, you will need to find a therapist. With this therapist, you will talk about your escape plan. You’ll talk about how the burns keep reappearing, getting worse, and how to treat them. You will start to understand how and why they crisp your skin the same way a grill chars a piece of your hamburger. You’ll begin to learn how the fire in your house works, and why it never extinguishes. And after years and years of extinguishing efforts, you’ll accept this fire is too strong. Your escape plan will start to take place.
     Once you step outside the first time and breathe fresh air, you’ll be astonished at how truly happy you can be. You’ll gain an understanding and recognition of yourself that you never had before. You will start to thrive off this fresh air. It feels healthy, clean, and refreshing. It’ll be so different from how you’re used to feeling so much, all at once, all the time. You will start to believe in yourself, in the fact that your ability to feel so largely is a good thing. 
         You’ll quickly realize that the reason you’re like this is because you’re outside of the house. You will want to run and never look back.
       But even though you’ll want to run, you have to stand in the driveway and watch. And involuntarily, you’ll also have to go back inside periodically. Your parents keep you attached by one singular string: financial control. You will also need to check on the dog and your brother. While doing so, you need to be prepared for seeing your parents throw lighter fluid onto each other trying to see which one turns to ash first. And then get a few splashes on yourself, too. So then you get burnt.
         You’ll stand in the driveway, outside, looking at your house burn, but the fire department will not have shown up yet. This wait for them will feel like an eternity. Your family will be inside, yelling manipulative tactics to get you to run after them, and you’ll have a small need to run in and save them. Not because you love them and they are your family, but because that’s who you are. You are the kind of person who will run into a burning building for someone no matter who they are or what they did. But your years of pain, misery, depression, and trauma makes that part of you dwindle when noticing their cries.


         You’ll be quite confused at the fact that these feelings coexist. It’s important to remember that you have a right to feel that way. Keep in mind this does not make you a bad human, it means your brain is traumatized. They did it to themselves.

Your time in the driveway outside of the burning house allows for those burns to heal up and scar. And although each time you walk inside, either thinking that your entire body is basically a scar at this point and there’s nowhere else that could possibly burn or prepared for what the fluid does to your skin that makes it crisp, the flame is always worse than you think. And so is the recovery. 

During this time in your driveway, you’ll need to come up with what you want your own house to look like, because you refuse to let it burn. 

         You’ll want warm colors instead of dark and cool ones.
         Pink, yellow, light blue, pale and soft shades of red, pretty greens.
         You’ll want lots of plants.
         You’ll decide to have windchimes that blow in the wind instead of loud voices.
         You’ll want warm lights and candles instead of cool and bright ones to drown intensity.
         You’ll keep people in this house that are soft and caring instead of intimidating and mean.


This cycle of going in and out and in and out of your burning house will continue, all the way through college. All the way until the fire department finally shows up. At this point, you’ll be able to run and never look back.

Because once the firefighters come and grab you, they cut all your ties to that house. The misery, the abuse, the emotional neglect, the control it has over you, the financial manipulation, 
the people in it.

           You never have to go back.


Surviving it will be hard. Surviving it is hard. And you wouldn’t be who you are today if you don’t survive it. You like yourself today. Give yourself some grace. If you could leave, you would’ve already left.

Remember that it’s awful you couldn’t be a kid and had to grow up so fast, and that your emotional maturity is a gift. Although confusing, these can both be true. Your ability and intuition to read people is helpful. You make people feel comfortable. You know what to do in every situation, you know how to help, and you provide great emotional space for others who need it. 

And also please remember to find someone like that for yourself. You cannot do it alone. He will make you feel so loved and remind you of these facts when you are too burnt to remember yourself.

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Once the firefighters pull you out and you run away to safety, you have accomplished our goal. Survival is more than enough. It will be then, that you can live.

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Sam Holmes is a 2nd year English major student at Roosevelt University, with a minor in writing. She is a writer in the Chicago area, and just getting started on publishing her work.



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