There was no way that the heat of the flames that burned before her eyes were any hotter than the chilling inferno that threatened to consume her heart.

She didn't care about the pain from the third-degree burns on her arm. She cared about the pieces of her soul that were now turning to ash, the pieces that she had received those burns in trying to save.

It was ironic how the element that had caused the source of the fire was doing nothing to quench its flames.

It had started with a storm. A thunderstorm. A thunderstorm that had given birth to a flood in the valley area in which she lived. A thunderstorm that had also given birth to lightning. Lightning that had struck the windows of her house and shattered them. Lightning that had then struck a carpet in one room, then a wire in that same room, then that same wire touching that same carpet in that same room. And as the rain had continued, and her parents had been keeping the flood-waters and bay on the first floor below, she had watched as a fire started in the room she had just run into upon hearing the lightning strike that room.

Her bedroom.

The room in which all of her books and folders and binders and papers and pencils and words and drawings had been in.

In a panic, she had run for the fire extinguisher kept in the hallway. But in that same panic, she had fumbled with it and been unable to detach it from the wall. And in that same panic, she had watched the flames spread across the carpet in the doorway and race to the carpet in the doorway of the room next to it. And in that same panic, she had dashed through the flames in a desperate attempt to save her life.

Her life, which consisted of all the papers and folders and books that were trapped in her room.

They were all either in a pile on her desk or stacked neatly in the wooden bookshelf next to it. The wire that had sparked the fire was plugged into the wall next to the bookshelf.

The flames had reached the bookshelf and the desk, but had not yet consumed their contents. As she had reached for them, the flames had first consumed the skin on her outstretched arm.

In that moment, she hadn't registered the pain in her arm, or the fat that she was howling in pain, or the fact that she was screaming at the top of her lungs in a desperate and frantic cry of agony, or the sound of heavy footsteps and shouts behind her, or the feeling of two strong arms wrapping around her waist and lifting her up and dragging her away.

In that moment, she had only registered the sight of yellow and orange and crimson and scarlet and red eating away at the papers that meant everything to her.

And now, standing in the doorway of her front door, the flames in the upstairs hallway clearly visible, she falls to her knees and cries a river she hopes will cause a flood and carry her away from this terrible scene. Her father keeps one hand on her shoulder. She watches as her mother grabs the fire extinguisher and takes it down the hallway.

The fire never reached the stairs, let alone the first floor.

But nonetheless, it had destroyed the 13 year-old's entire world in less than five minutes.

From then on, she had always been afraid of thunderstorms and fires.

Her house had been fine, for the most part. The flames had never reached the first floor, or even the entrance to the hallway which her room was at the end of.

Her room had taken most of the damage. The glass window pane had been shattered. The plug of the cord had been melted into the outlet in the wall and the cord itself had been burned and frayed, making the item it powered useless. Not that it would have worked anyway, for the floor lamp had been knocked over by the wind, hole burned in the lampshade, light-bulb cracked and burned out. The carpet...what carpet?, because all that remained of it were blackened floorboards.

And of course, her books had all been destroyed. All of them. Her reading books, the books she had been writing, her sketch books, her diaries, her...her everything.

The only thing of hers that had survived was her computer, which had been in the room next to her bedroom. The fire had not reached it. But all her computer had were school-related things, non of them personal or related to her dreams.

But as she sat in that room a week later, hat room having become her room while work was being done on her fire-damaged bedroom, she realized something. The computer could be her savior. Technology was far less destructible than paper, right?

And so, after a week of being in a semi-depressed state due to her loss, she started relying entirely on computers and the internet for all of her writing and artwork. Of course, she started with little because she couldn't replace what the fire had taken from her, but eventually her creations were just as numerous as before. She transferred what few things she wrote on loose-leaf to her computer as soon as she got to it. She even used her email as a way to work on her poems and stories when not at home. she scanned her artwork into her computer, and all other artwork was digitally created.

She had gone paperless.

There was still always that fear that something would happen to cause her to lose it all again. She had become paranoid, in a way. But nonetheless, she knew her precious words and lines and creations were safe.

Then one day, she couldn't get to her computer to work. It turned on, but refused to start up properly.

She panicked.

The problem persisted for the duration of that week. She tried everything. She called tech support, took it to a tech shop, asked a tech-savy friend, tried fiddling with the wires and plugs despite her paranoia over the fact that wires had been her downfall in the first place.

As it turned out, the wires weren't the problem. The computer itself was. Her hard drive had crashed. And when she attempted to revive it and save the information on it, she was horrified to learn that her computer had been infected by a virus at the same time.

So a month after her computer had started having problems, she is alone in her dorm room, on her knees, useless computer dismantled in front of her, tears rushing down her red cheeks. She hugs herself tightly, but it does nothing to cease the violent shuddering of her body as she cries tears just as salty as the ones she painfully remembers having cried years ago over the loss of her papers in a fire during a thunderstorm.

Because not only did she lose all of her school files, but the 21 year-old also once again lost everything that she had worked so hard to replace and create.

Her roommate set up a donation fund that all of their colleagues contributed to, which raised more than enough money to buy her two new computers. She was extremely grateful for the money, but unappreciative of the laptop she bought with a portion of that money. She didn't trust it.

She became even more paranoid about the safety of her precious literary and artistic creations.

With the remaining money from the donations, she bought several flash drives, a smart phone, a tablet, a new printer/scanner, and a highly developed and reliable anti-virus software for her laptop. She went back to using paper. She still scanned in her artwork and she still transferred her stories to her computer documents. She backed up everything on her email and her flash drives.

She still remained paranoid that something would happen yet again, but she forced herself to remain optimistic and confident that she had taken every measure possible to ensure that her words and pictures were safe from total loss and could always be recovered.

Having saved up years of money earned from her part-time job as a journalist and her paid internship as an artist's assistant, she had enough money to buy a single-story home in the suburbs, not far from the college she graduated from with plenty of degrees and experience to eventually and hopefully get a full-time job as a writer and artist.

And hopefully, if that all went well, she would then be able to get her stories and poems published as books. Hopefully, if everything turned out fine, she would end up having her pictures ad drawings featured in museums and magazines. Hopefully, if things happened as planned, her dreams would become a reality.

Hopefully.

But hope can only go so far.

Hope can't stop a thief.

She realized this when she returned home one afternoon to find her front door wide open, the doorknob on the lawn outside, the door frame dented in four places, the lock bent out of shape. For a split second, she saw flames at the top of the stairs of her one-story house.

Inside was absolute chaos. The couch cushions were slashed, the television was missing, the drawers and cabinets broken, fridge and freezer contents all over the kitchen floor, every window with a scratch or hole in its surface.

But the real damage had been done in her bedroom.

It was bad enough that her valuables were missing. But what was worse was the fact that so were her money, her printer, her flash drives, her smart phone...

And the contents of her file cabinet—containing all of her hard copies for everything—was ruined. The papers inside were ripped and torn and crumpled and stained and blotched and missing and destroyed...and...and...
Her tablet's screen was totally shattered. The device itself was literally in two pieces.

None of it was recoverable. None of it.

Down on her knees, she is about to press call on her cordless house phone so as to call the police. But she doesn't. Instead, she drops the phone and picks up the two pieces that once made up her tablet and cradles them in her arms. The jagged edges and cracked glass cut her arms, but she doesn't care. All she cares about is the fact that it will take her forever to repair the damage to her house, her belongings, her finances...the fact that her career has been ruined before it even began, and...

The fact that everything she had worked for, everything she had tried to fix, and everything her heart and soul had tried to create had been robbed from her at age 30.