They burned down the apartment complex this morning while everyone watched from across the parking lot. Drones from the local news flew over and filmed it all. We were told the materials in the guy's apartment were far too dangerous to let us back in, even to quickly grab a precious heirloom or two under police supervision. So we lost everything.

Unmade beds, indented pillows. half-drunk glasses of water sprinkled with dust on our nightstands. Older residents with albums of undigitized photos, children with bedrooms full of toys. There was a rumor that one woman was going to lose her mother's ashes amid all the other ashes, but that seemed a little too on the nose.

The guy's coworkers said he smelled weird and took his lunches alone, but no one suspected anything. His obituary omitted the cause of death, but said he'd gone home to his Heavenly Father. That he had a thirst for knowledge and was an avid reader. That he graduated from some fundamentalist school down in Florida. That he minored in chemistry.

As the smoke began to rise, I thought about us cuddling in front of the TV while the guy was hard at work mixing volatile substances down the hall.

There is something surreal about the final seconds, when your life as you knew it existed intact—piles of junk mail you never got around to throwing away, dishes you swore you were going to do, pictures you planned to finally hang up once you bought the proper hardware.

I wonder if he ever had a girlfriend. If he was secretly gay and didn't want his family to know. I wonder what might have happened if I'd wandered down the hall late one night after you left me and knocked on his door, invited him over for a beer, played video games with him on our TV—my TV—a TV that is now charred to a crisp.

If the guy hadn't inadvertently blown himself up, he would have taken whatever he was making to some crowded public space, and I would have learned about it from the comfort of my own intact couch, reading about the casualties and sipping a beer from the same glass that was sitting on my coffee table this morning when they torched the place.

And if multiple things had gone differently, I might have read about it on my phone and told you what happened as we cuddled on the couch. We might have reflected on it together, then watched another show before getting into my bed—our bed—a bed that is now a set of blackened coils. Slept in that bed together while the FBI went through the guy's apartment—the building intact, my unit intact, our lives intact, even though however many people at a mall or a movie theater or wherever would not be.

But also the toys, the photo albums, that poor woman's mother's ashes—because God knows you always said I make everything about me.

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