The fire was everywhere and the smoke was thick and blinding. It burned my eyes and got into my lungs, clogging them. I coughed and choked on it as I tried to breathe. Each breath was like trying to breathe water -- impossible and painful. It felt like the air itself wanted me to die. 

     And it was so hot too. So impossibly hot it felt like the fire was trying to eat me alive. I held my arms up in front of me in an attempt to protect myself from the worst of the heat as I stumbled blindly through the burning building.

     The fire's hissing and crackling sound like a tiny voice whispering in my ear, telling me to give up. Telling me to die. 

     'I can't,' I told the voice. 'I promised them!'

     'You promised them what?' the voice in the fire hissed. 'Promised them what?'

     It asked me what I had promised them over and over again when I didn't reply, mocking me and my attempt to survive its assault on my life. I stumbled blindly through the smoke and flames searching for a way out and away from the cruel voice. It followed me as I looked, filling my ears with its mocking chant. Eventually I could take no more and filled my lungs as best I could before screaming my frustration and defiance at the fire.

     "I promised I would protect them!" I yelled. "I promised everyone that I would!

     At that moment, I blundered into something hard, flat, cold, and as smooth as glass. The heat of the fire and the effects of the smoke all but disappeared when I hit it. Things grew quiet as I pushed myself back from the object I had ran into to look at what the object was.   

     I found myself staring into a pair of brown, blood shot eyes. They stared back at me from a face marred by burns and blisters cause by the fire. Tears from the eyes made visible tracks in the soot that covered the face. When I reached up to touch my own face, I realized I was staring into a mirror.

     But it wasn't just any mirror. It was the same mirror from my room I had written on as a child. In a bout of frustration and dispair, I had taken a small jar of pink lips gloss and wrote words to express my feelings of what I wanted and promised to do. The words themselves were little more than faint pink smudges on the glass now, mostly due to the passage of time and my mother's one attempt at cleaning them off. Here and there, however, you could still pick the occasional word out of the illegible mess it had become. My memory of what I had written on there, like the words, had faded but I could still remember the intent I had when I first wrote them.

     Past the smudges I could see my refection and I wasn't surprised I hadn't recognized it. The fire had done quiet the number on me physically. The clothes I had been wearing had turned into burnt scraps of cloth hanging limply from my flame abused body. All the hair on my head and arm was gonna too; thier flammable nature making them the first thing to go when fire was around.