It's 7.48am now and the whole family (excluding my dad) just got home. I've never been more awake at this time. Unusual, because I was still sleeping soundly at 6am this morning.

I awoke to my mom's anxious calls at 6.10am and the first thing i breathed in, were chunks of smoke. "Get up, quick, I think there's a fire". And then my neighbour knocked anxiously on our door. "Get out of the house now, there's a fire!" Good, now somebody confirmed it within five minutes after I woke up and that was quick. The smoke was overwhelming and I couldn't breathe. We ran down the stairs, but got stucked on the sixth floor because the heat was too strong and the smoke was choking on us (I could hear shouting and firemen trying to bang down doors and it all sounded very scary at the moment). We back up to the seventh floor to go by the other staircase. I pass by an opened door and a little malay girl was standing there, "Ask your mother to come out of the house quick,". "There's a fire", my brother added, helpfully. Oh, yea, i almost forgot to tell.

There were already people crowding around when we got down to the void deck. And here, I got a better view of where the fire was coming from. It was from the third storey. It was dark and the electricity in that part of the block was out. The fire was burning like hell. As in the hell illustrated for picture books (for the first time, I wasn't using this word to emphasize my point like in "what the hell are you doing?", it is now, as I learnt from my new book, a metaphor). Strings of fire engines, ambulances, and police cars flooded my carpark, and the carpark was sealed up. Neighbours came down and started talking. My brother went up to get my uncle and his family, who is living on the fourth storey.

I heard the neighbours who are living on the third storey say that the corner which was burning used to be messy and filled with newspapers and fish tank and all those garang guni stuff. There are two units in that corner and both families were stucked in their houses because the fire was burning right in front of their doors. So it was the stuff that were burning, and creating such a big fire. I looked up and tried to imagine myself in their scenario. Then I stopped halfway through the scenario I was making up in my mind because if what I experienced in my own home was that bad, then the smoke from the fire outside their flats could most probably have already suffocated them.

The fire was out within 45 minutes (I had forgotten to bring my watch so I checked with my brother). The sky was still dark. What I saw next, seems depressing. A torchlight searched among the ashes. And I wondered what they would find. I wondered how the family was doing, because I heard there were children and an old lady inside. I tried to look away, and I thought about the punctured hole in a boy's arm I saw three days ago. The hole was the size of a fifty-cent coin, punctured inwards with the skin distored among his flesh, like if you poke a hole in a piece of paper with a pencil hard, you'll see the paper around the torn area going inwards. That was how the skin on the punctured hole looked like. I couldn't wash it with running water because it was too deep so I poured antiseptic lotion on a gauze and covered it, bandaged and sent him home. I found out that he had bumped into the edge of a whiteboard after being pushed by some kids. And then I thought about how all these things cannot be compared to what the firemen were looking for.

My part of the void deck (lift B) to the burning part (lift A) was sealed up by the police. People were all using lift C (the part of the block which was a safe distance from the burnt part) to come down. About another half hour later, my older cousin who lived on the fourth storey came by and said she saw the paramedics holding an unconscious malay little girl, and there were many children in that house. The police and firemen went up to every unit to evacuate everyone. Nobody was allowed to go back, except for those who lived near lift C (which is the safe part). So my family was stucked down there for nearly two hours before we all came back up quietly.

I've never been more awake than any of my usual days. What happened this morning scare me. I did not even think of bringing money and bank book and passport and watch and mobile phone and ipod and laptop and xiao mao and my favourite books; everything that seemed so important to me. Then I thought, if there's a fire, the first thing to be burnt away would be my books. And yet I was so upset over my broken book which was drenched a few days ago. It felt so bad to hold on to something and see that it's broken. Then I recalled what my younger cousin told me, that whatever things I have now are tangible and will never last in my life. It's the intangible things in each and everyone of us that matters. This morning when I stood there and watch the fire, I felt like crying. I am glad dad had gone to work before the fire started. I could still recall my mother's horrified voice this morning - "Get up, I think there's a fire". A fire broke dawn two days before the Lunar New Year. My brother said at least it's not a boring day. Well, true. Despite a depressing morning, I have to admit that this is a good one. Next time if my mother used the same sentence when I miss my alarm, she would defintely succeed in waking me up. It is 9.49am now, and the police cars are still downstairs. It's the investigating part that's tiring. I hope they find out the cause quickly so we could all be more careful in future, and hopefully to remind all of us to stop leaving newspapers and all sorts of rubbish along the corridor.

Well, to some, it is just a fire so no big fuss over it, but seriously, you will never think this way if you are part of it. Unknowingly, I made a new discovery. I found out that my inner nose was covered with soot when I rubbed it. My feet were also covered with soot (well... the feet part is still quite predicitable). Some of you might have already known this, but I just found out today about the inner nose and it's truly amazing to learn something out of an unusual day.