Ash to Ashes.

My ex Ash, the poet with the book that includes poems about me in it, got a cat for Christmas, which was the day after I spoke to him last on the phone. Since Christmas, we've exchanged maybe five e-mails.

So, the day I needed a ride to pick up my car, I e-mailed him to ask him if he could drive me. And he wrote back, saying, "I'm sorry I haven't called you. I lost your number. My house burned down - with my address book in it."

Now, a couple years ago, I referred to this sort of blunt, point-blank statement as an "aplomb bomb."

Of course, Ash is a imagery-heavy poet and - over the course of the eight years I've known him - he's occasionally proven himself to be a temperamental, melodramatic, scheming liar and a medicated psychotic. So I asked him if his house really burned down or if he was "speaking in metaphor."

He wrote back and told me that he wasn't trying to be funny.

Apparently, he put a heating pad in his cat's bed on his recessed porch sometime since Christmas. And it caused a fire. And it destroyed the top floor of his house. And it's caused $100,000 worth of damage, and his insurance is maxed out already.

And the gaggle of roommates that he was letting live there had to be relocated. And I don't know where he's staying - with his kitten - but he wasn't really sleeping all that often in his own house prior to the fire.

I don't know why I'm writing about this on my blog. This, after all, has nothing to do with me, so I find myself criticizing the details of the fire. (Why would you put a heating pad in a cat's bed? Wow, this makes Ash's name really ironic.)

If we were better friends - or in love - or something like that, I think I would be torn up about this. This is the last person I slept with, after all, and I slept with them in November.

But he didn't keep my number. And he didn't e-mail me about a fire.

So I think I'm caring about this just as much as I should - and not any more than that.