Breathing comes easily. You do it without thought, mechanically. The taste and smell of the air around you become monotonous, simply another part of your environment that you cease to notice or pay attention to. Until something changes.

A light, air-conditioned breeze blew across my feet from the vent below my desk. I had my head phones in, and was humming to the tune, wearily righting down the history answers, but I wasn't too down in the mouth about it.

Something caught in my throat the next breath I took, just as I was about to claim the year that Columbus "discovered" America was 1492. Living in the city you smell pollution and car exhaust. You don't smell smoke, the smell of something burning, unless you are seriously screwing up dinner. I knew that couldn't be it.

I peeked through my bedroom door, gazing down the stairs. The smoke was growing thicker, and with every breath I drew in my body rejected it harshly, I coughed as if I had just inhaled poison. I had.

The smoke was now so thick and billowing that I could not see my hand in front of my face. With every breath that brought no relief, it felt as if my lungs were being yanked out of my body, as if if they weren't in me they could get some oxygen, some cool, fresh air.

Drenched on sweat, I felt my way along the wall, setting my foot cautiously on the first step of the staircase. I could not hold my own weight up, and I tumbled down the burning staircase, my bones shattering and skin blistering.

There is fear, and then there is panic. Panic breaks through the surface of my fear, and replaces fear and rationality all at once. The world is spinning round as I roll down the stairs, hitting my head, chest, shoulders. My arm catches on a step—I immediately know what will happen and try to stop it—but crack goes my bone, and the arm that I rely on is destroyed. I begin to think that this monotonous tumbling, burning, terror, pain, will never end, and I visualize a gun in my hands.

"It would hardly hurt. It would be so quick. . ."

But the tools to end the pain are not at my disposal. With a thud the monotony ends, and the tiny bit of air I did not know I contained left me. I gasped and reached and struggled, but the air simply drifted away, carried by smoke and blackness. My vision tunneled, as fire and heat crawled under my skin, searing me and eating at me. If I could've screamed, I would have, but the oxygen for that was lost forever.

As the black tunnel deepened at the edges, blacker than smoke against the night sky, I felt myself slipping away. Pain was no longer relevant to me, to my mind. My slowly fading, dissolving mind that no longer cared that death was what was tugging it into slumber, not a much needed rest.

Sirens pierce the blackness that smothers me, the tunnel and the smoke. Cool air, cool oxygen whooshes over me. Strong arms pick me up, carry me out. I fight the darkness, widen the tunnel so I can see the stars over head, muted by the smoke that spells destruction.

Someone places me in a box. I think, slowly trying to gain some idea of my surroundings. An ambulance, I realize, as someone in white places a plastic mask on my face that flows with hissing gas. I can breath, and I take it in gulps, but the man in white says distantly, "Slow, deep breaths. That's it. Your going to be alright."

If I had had the strength to furrow my brow, I would have. There was still that irreplaceable no danger, no safety, no feelings. I was okay with that. I wanted to sleep, to close my eyes and rest, wake up in my own bed, the soft sheets cool, holding me in bed. But every time I would doze off, feeling like a naughty child in grade school, the man in white would shake me shoulder and tell me to "hang on." I would clutch at the edges of the gurney I was on, taking him literally.

Horrifying pain became evident on my body. My throat burned and ached like it was torn to shreds. Burns nagged at me, pulsing with pain, at the edge of memory and reality. I felt sick to my stomach with fear again. The resumed flow of oxygen awakened me to the wide, frightening world.

I wasn't ready for the hospital, for the bed and the equipment. But I was ready for sleep when ti was allowed, and it was a sleep void of worry or pain, all evicted form my impaired mind by the medicine that meant, "Sleep whether you like it or not."