7 April 2015, Tuesday, around 6:30 PM. My mom had just finished praying in her room so she went downstairs to check on dinner. My father had gone to their prayer meeting alone, which was unusual because, since his stroke last Christmas, my father rarely went anywhere alone anymore.

The maid smelled plastic burning. “What’s could that be,” she asked my mom. “The neighbors must be burning something,” my mom replied.

My youngest brother had his headphones on. He too smelled something burning but thought that it was the fan for his computer that was overheating. Then, through his open door, he saw the smoke. He stuck his head outside his door and saw my parents’ room engulfed in flames. He yelled, “Fire!” and ran downstairs to turn off the main switch. My mother ran back upstairs, but the fire was already at the corridor.

One of the neighbors rushed in with a fire extinguisher. Others came in to help move the cars out of the garage. The maid, who had fled outside in a panic, rushed back inside the house to turn off the gas.

Apparently, the neighbors had seen the fire before anyone in the house was aware of it, and they were worried that the fire would spread through the village. They called several fire houses in different precincts so that five firetrucks showed up. The whole thing was over in half an hour.

Our house is actually two houses joined in the middle. On the second floor of the first half of the house are my parents’ room, their work room, and my brother’s room. While only my parents’ room totally burned down, leaving a gaping hole to the first floor, the fire razed the ceiling of their half of the house and badly damaged the other rooms.

Everything is covered in soot. It looks like a rampaging monster, crying black tears, tore through the upper half of the house and stopped`abruptly outside the last two rooms on the second half of the house, one of which happens to be my room. When I got home on April 21st, my mother showed me the damage and, when she opened the door to my room, it looked exactly as I had left it.

Of course, upon closer inspection, the soot still managed to get in. It crept through the closet doors and trickled in through the roof.

And so, for the past three weeks that I’ve been home, we’ve been going through things, cleaning what needs to be cleaned, and packing up anything and everything so that we can begin the process of rebuilding.

The work is sweaty, dirty, and unending. It’s amazing, for folks who’ve just had a fire, we still have a hell of a lot of stuff.

Hot Tip: Going through the debris, we discovered that things that were in plastic containers survived the fire well – and the subsequent rain of soot. For instance, my mom has a snack box where she stashes things she wants to munch on while watching television at night. The box was under the TV in their burnt room. When they found it, the plastic was charred but everything inside was intact. Just goes to show how long it takes for plastic to be incinerated. Suffice it to say, all my stuff is now contained in plastic storage boxes.

8 April, Wednesday, 7:20 PM. We had just endured a grueling ride from Delhi to Uttarakhand, India and had stopped for the night at Te Aroha Hotel in Dhanachuli. As soon as I logged onto their WiFi, I found out about the fire from my cousin through WhatsApp.

When I arrived, my parents were staying at the neighbor’s. (They’ve since moved to my godfather’s house.) On my first night home, I stayed with them. On the second night, I transferred to my room in the burnt house.

My first night at the burnt out house. I felt like one of Miss Peregrine’s peculiar children.

I spent ten nights there without electricity. The heat kept me awake. My new favorite battery-operated device became the rechargeable fan, when we eventually got around to buying one. (FYI, the Firefly model is heaps better than the Akari one, and it is much cheeper too. Available at The DIY Shop on the third floor of Eastwood Mall.)

On May 2, I finally moved to a friend’s apartment. He invested in some apartments which he rents out. Fortunately for me, his apartment along Katipunan Avenue, which is five minutes away from my house, is currently unoccupied. While I had the key since I arrived, I didn’t get around to having the apartment cleaned until I moved in. I spent ten nights there, then returned to the house for a final night, locked and sealed my room – and am now in Cebu with Nicolas, awaiting a flight to Tokyo.

In the midst of all that, I still managed to work out.

On my first week, I did four Bikram classes (Th, Sa, Mo, Tu), and went to Gold’s Gym twice on the weekend (Fr, Su). No wonder I was so grumpy. I was hardly sleeping and was exhausting myself to death. And let me just tell you that Bikram in the Philippine summer heat is absolutely hellish. Please remind me to never do it again.

I then cut the workouts to just Gold’s Gym every weekend. Went three times on the second weekend, and only twice during the last. It was a struggle to go. Apart from being exhausted, I was also bored to death by the gym.

In the late evenings, I walked the dog, which resulted in the unfortunate side effect of its undying devotion towards me. If only it knew that I was only walking it for my benefit, not hers. Of course, when my parents took the dog with them to my godfather’s house, I missed the damned thing. I had no one to walk me! Ah, well…

Life goes on.