flashback, flashforward

[psocoptera]

It's possible that Josh and I are always going to be the people who evacuate and call 911 whenever our smoke alarm goes off, now. That seems fair, as, like, trauma symptoms go. The last time this happened, at Chaos's house just a few days after our fire, I had the closest thing to A Flashback I've ever experienced; at some level I sort of knew it was irrational but I was *totally emotionally sure* it was happening again and was somehow our fault and we were cursed to destroy homes, or something. (It was a malfunctioning alarm.) This time I felt it was fairly likely nothing although part of my brain was also sort of running through contingencies like "maybe the dryer caught? I guess the clothes *in there* might not be salvageable, the rest should wash up again ok". (It was a malfunctioning alarm again.) I think I'm getting less hysterical in my paranoia, anyways, which is something.

Also notable is that *last* Monday I had a strange conversation with our landlords about how they had gotten an email from Josh about the smoke detectors going off and us having to disconnect them, and I was like, what, that never happened, except now it has and Josh has sent that email, raising the possibility that our landlady is a) precognitive or b) receiving her email from the future, a week early. Or, okay, because I live in reality, perhaps this was a problem the previous tenants were experiencing too, and there was a miscommunication somewhere about who had reported what when, but, uh, I hope it does not make me too much of a crazy person if I plan to listen *very carefully* to anything else my landlords mention having gotten email from us about?

Comments

[irilyth]

For what it's worth, if it had been a single battery-operated not-hardwired-to-the-whole-rest-of-the-house alarm, I think I would've been fine with not calling the fire department. The fact that we couldn't figure out which alarm it was, or how to disable it, left me really uninterested in screwing around. :^p