“There’s always new places to see and new things to experience so never settle at one place”
The back and forth relocating made me eager to see new places, so her response sounded reasonable to me. Over the years we’ve moved so many times that I’ve lost count but one thing was certain and constant the hotel or apartment we stayed previously before moving always ended up collapsing and burning down. It’s a strange occurrence but I didn’t give in much thought.
But everything changed the night I turned seventeen. We were living on the sixth floor of a quiet roadside hotel nothing special, nothing different. But that night, I woke to the faint smell of smoke. At first I thought it was coming from outside, maybe someone burning trash, but when I stepped into the hallway, the lights were off and the smoke was coming from the opposite end of the corridor.
I ran back inside to wake my mother, but she was already awake, sitting upright on the bed, fully dressed, a small suitcase by her feet. Almost as if she had been waiting.
“Get your shoes on,”
She said. Her voice wasn’t calm this time. It was flat, tired. As we hurried down the emergency stairs, alarms blaring behind us, I could feel the heat building. People were screaming, doors slamming, fire spreading. And my mother, she didn’t look back once. Not at the flames, not at the people, not at the building she somehow knew was going to burn. When we reached the parking lot, far from the chaos, I finally grabbed her arm.
“Mom… how did you know?”
She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she watched the hotel as it was swallowed by flames, her eyes reflecting the fire like she’d seen it happen a hundred times.
“Because it always ends this way,”
She whispered.
“Every place we touch, every place we stay it happens again.”
I stared at her, confused and terrified.
“What do you mean we?”
She slowly turned to look at me like she was seeing something she’d hoped wouldn’t appear for years and said,
“You’re old enough now. Old enough for the truth. It never started with me.”
She reached out and placed her hand over my chest.
“It started with you. But I won’t let it end with you”
