[SerpentSun]

Another thing....

If I recall corectly from my studies, although I may be wrong, there are certain life events that multiple cultures around the world consider the mark of a shaman, witch doctor, medicine man/woman, etc.

These events include severe burns, lightning strikes, and venomous snakebites. But I'm not sure if near-misses or vivid dreams really count. If so, I've experienced all three in some sense.

All my life, I've felt an affinity for fire. Like a blend of love and fear. As a small child, I would stare into the flames and feel their life and beauty. I also developed an early interest in astronomy and geology, focusing on the subject of stars and volcanoes.

Yet at the same time, I've always bern plagued by horrible nightmares of house fires, volcanic eruptions, and the occasional nuclear explosion. Oftentimes I'm struggling to save my family or some innocent animal. Perhaps my dad working as a firefighter has something to do with it, but he never really told me about any fires until I got older.

Furthermore, there have been way too many near-misses with house fires in my life. Usually the result of the adults in my home drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. If someone dropped hot embers and was oblivious to a fire they caused, I would always be the one to notice.

When I was about 11-14 years old, my mom and I were watching movies one night. She had been drinking a bit, but not enough to be unbearable. We baked a frozen pizza in the oven for dinner. At some point, we both smelled smoke and searched the house for any fire, but sat back down when we couldn't find anything. On a random hunch, I decided to list up all the blankets I had been sitting on. A fire had been lit under my butt.

Twice in my life, exactly 5 years apart to the day, a fire in my apartment building got bad enough to call the fire department. The first time, when I was 10, was an arson in the apartment two floors below. Their place was wrecked, but we only had smoke damage. The second fire was a week right after my brother committed suicide, and it was a fire caused by an accumulation of dryer lint. It was the floor right beneath us and we were once again spared. Even so, we got the hell out of there permanently.

Right before the first fire, I had a very strong urge to leave the apartment. I didn't smell any smoke or feel any heat, but I just wanted to get out of there, and I knew I should take my new Pomeranian puppy. I thought I was hungry, so I asked my mom if we could go to the drive-through for some food. When we got out to the car with the dog, my mom happened to notice the window blinds in the bottom apartment melting. Black smoke poured out when she opened the door.

Even now, the sight of melting plastic still disturbs me.

When the second fire started, I was home alone. Smelled smoke, like I'm always the first one to do, but couldn't find anything on our floor. I told myself the downstairs neighbors just burnt some food, but I started packing my bags and putting leashes on the dogs just in case. The smoke in the house just kept getting thicker.

I didn't want to call the firefighters, because my mom would give me hell if it was a false alarm. So I called her on the phone and told her my suspicions, she instisted that the neighbors burnt some food, and I decided to wait until she got back. Sitting calmly on the house with my dogs and my belongings as the house filled
with smoke.

My mom started panicking as soon as she walked in.

Nothing else eventful happened until I was 17. Sometime in mid-September, about a week before I met my boyfriend, I had to walk home from school in particularly powerful thunderstorm. Wallowing in self-pity over stupid teenage things, I noticed that songs about storms kept playing on my mp3 player. Which got waterlogged and broke before I was halfway home. Angry and angsty, I sincerely begged God to just strike me down.

So he almost did. A lightning bolt struck within....oh I don't know between 15 and 50 feet. I have really bad depth-perception haha. But it was definitely close enough to smell an acrid odor, and to feel an awful tingling sensation. Then my dad took me the mall that afternoon, and one of those fortune-teller robots predicted I'd meet a partner with the same sun sign as my boyfriend.

The snakebite dream still freaks me out. Sometime last year, I had the most vivid nightmare that blessed me with a renewed passion for ethnobotany and biochemistry. Two snakes were in my bedroom, a timber rattlesnake and a golden cobra, and it was as if I had to choose between them. The timber rattlesnake then bit me on the right forearm.

As you can imagine, I was pretty freaked out. But just like when my mom accidentally stabbed me in the forehead, I was like "Well dang. This is actually happening. Time to get to work." Refusing to go to the hospital, I began to treat my injury to the best of my ability, and fought through the illness as I researched my condition.