The Things I Grabbed Before the Water Did

I woke up because something sounded... wrong. You known how your brain immediately starts making terrible guesses in the middle of the night? Maybe someone was knocking on the gate. Maybe a pipe had burst. Maybe my neighbour had finally decided 2 a.m. was the perfect time to rearrange furniture. I rolled over, opened one eye, put my foot on the floor... and discovered the floor had become a puddle.

Now, I’d love to tell you I reacted like the lead character in an action film. That I calmly assessed the situation before executing a flawless evacuation plan. The truth is I made a noise that I hope nobody else heard, stumbled into the darkness, and watched as water wandered around my house with the confidence of someone who’d been paying rent for months.

There wasn’t time to think. The flood had already introduced itself to my shoes and was making suspicious eye contact with the extension box. I needed to act quickly. Not because I had a plan, but because panic has an incredible way of disguising itself as urgency. This was no longer my house. This was now a rescue mission.

The laptop was first, obviously. There wasn’t even a debate. That thing contains years of music projects, unfinished articles, half-baked ideas, folders labelled “Final Final” that absolutely are not final, and enough important files to make losing it feel like deleting several versions of myself. I tucked it under my arm with the kind of determination usually reserved for carrying toddlers out of burning buildings, except this toddler happened to run on Windows.

Then came the scarf.

Before you judge me, understand that every person owns one item of clothing that has somehow earned diplomatic immunity. Mine is a scarf. It’s survived road trips, rainy evenings, cold cinemas, late-night walks, and enough questionable fashion decisions to deserve a medal. Was it practical to rescue it before several other possessions? Absolutely not. Was I going to leave it behind? Also absolutely not. Some things simply refuse to be abandoned, regardless of what common sense has to say about the matter.

With the essentials secured, I turned back toward the room and saw them.

Two paintings.

They were hanging there with the calm confidence of passengers who had completely misunderstood the announcement that the ship was sinking. Water was creeping steadily across the floor while they remained exactly where they’d always been, blissfully unaware that gravity and moisture were moments away from forming an alliance against them. I looked at them. They looked at me. Well... they would have, if paintings could look.

The first one was closest to the rising water, so naturally I launched into what can only be described as the least graceful rescue operation in modern history. I half slid, half skated across the room, reached the wall with all the elegance of a newborn giraffe, and lifted the painting above my head like I’d just won a championship trophy. If anyone had walked in at that exact moment, they would’ve assumed I’d mistaken a canvas for the nation’s most valuable treasure. I refuse to apologise. Heroes aren’t always understood in their own time.

The second painting, however, had become a hostage to circumstance. To reach it meant stepping through water while balancing a laptop under one arm, a scarf around my neck, and the first painting like some oddly specific gym exercise. I considered admitting defeat for almost three seconds. Then I remembered that if I’d bought the painting, hung it on my wall, and spent months living with it, I wasn’t about to let it lose an argument with a puddle. So I staged a second rescue that was somehow even less dignified than the first, emerging from the room looking like a man who had robbed an art gallery while severely underprepared.

By the time everything was safely stacked on the highest surface I could find, I finally stopped to catch my breath. The water was still doing what water does, the house looked mildly offended, and I was standing there soaking wet, clutching a laptop, wearing a scarf that absolutely did not need rescuing, and guarding two paintings as though they were survivors of some great historical event. Looking back, I admit the priorities may have seemed... unconventional.

But that’s the funny thing about living with art. Somewhere between the day you hang it on the wall and the hundredth day you absentmindedly walk past it, it stops feeling like something you own. It becomes part of the soundtrack of your everyday life. It watches films with you, listens to conversations it was never invited into, and quietly witnesses ordinary days that don’t seem important until they’re gone. Saving those paintings wasn’t really about saving paint on canvas. It was about refusing to let a small part of my story float away.

So yes, I rescued a laptop. I rescued a scarf that almost certainly would’ve survived without my intervention. And I carried two paintings through a flooded room with all the confidence of a man convinced history would remember his bravery. Whether history agrees is another matter entirely.

If I ever had to do it all over again... I’d probably grab the scarf first.

- Alex.