The fire stared back at me. It blurred and flashed, vibrating and humming, nudging against me in a way where nothing was pure, yet simply the way things were. Through the blaze I saw the world as it was all of the time.
I looked into the fire, into the slurs of calm and hate and conflict and everything. That’s the thing - when you stop and think about nothing, you are engulfed by everything. When I stop and think about nothing I get goosebumps. It was the heat that was nice but the goosebumps were the cold truth.
I was detached from the world, like a fragmented, ripped paper, frayed at the edges, torn from a whole and discarded. But I liked it like that, unable to be touched by anything. I was my own. The light from the fire prodded and shimmied against me, from the vertexes of my toes to the summit where nothing was left, where I ended and everything else began, lapping at my edges. My fingers tasted the pockets of air shining with ashes around me. The feeling of everything was electrifying.
The circle of life. The circle of death. Our day is coming. I accept that. One of the sparks landed on my hand. It sizzled and purred before it blackened into deep nothingness. It made a home of me, nestling into my many fissures and faults. I smudged it. The heat softened and soothed, diminishing the bluntness around me. The heat melted me away from the world.
The light played with fate, wandering and jumping around like pesky sprites in that old story, so far away. The shadows pulled my eyelids down - heavy, droopy - until all I could see was the twitching of the fire behind splintering veins.
In the distance, someone is born; someone dies; someone dreams. God’s acre of the forgotten approaches with our destiny. Death is just as natural as life, yet the inferno of the world tells us otherwise. And we are all gulped into the majority.
The light bends my image. The world wanted me flat, level, temporary, transparent. So my desires became silt, my own blood dyed with the guilt of ordinary. But I wanted to be as thick and impassioned and random as the fire. I saw this in that moment, and it made me dizzy and angry and hot to think of a person being so flat. I belong in the world but I don’t belong like this. I belong here, in front of the fire, in front of something so real.
The flames were pungent and effervescent - a realization, the moments stuck between dreaming and reality, the place between boundaries.
As the fire twirled it meandered into smoke, into the air, into something different, singing with the movements of countless atoms. This is a place of constant motion and so I just try to sit still sometimes, very still, so I can feel the world echo around my fullness.