Another day.
(She rips pages from journals past and tosses them into a fire-safe wastebasket. Lights a match and watches as the flame eats the matchstick. She drops the fire in her fingertips and watches the flames spread.)
This isn’t the first time I've lit something on fire. The first time was in 2006. But that's a story for another day. Today, right now, as I watch embers jump then fall like confetti from the top of the room, something inside me melts. Call it a response to the heat of the fire. Call it internal dissipation. Call it what you want, but something is changed.
I'm surprised at how tall these flames are.
Maybe they'll touch the ceiling and burn a hole through the roof, lighting the sky ablaze.
I always did love sunsets. I'm glad that part of me is intact.
I'm burning the old me. My flesh will soon start to blister if I don't step away from these flames, but I can't help but cling to the heat like I'm clinging to mama and the warmth of her heart;
at times a gentle radiation of love, at times a fire that obliterates toxicity and purifies matter into love itself, at times a scorching […] that can destroy life.
I'm attracted to it all.
And the pages I'm burning lay at the bottom of this, shriveling into nothingness and filling the air with the smoke of my past. The smoke of some existence I once held onto like I, too, was content with shriveling into nothing.
And we don't need specifics,
because life is lived as a whole, made of components,
not just the components themselves.
New insights, mama is giving me as I'm starting to feel my skin become increasingly sensitive to the light and recognize a struggle to breathe. I struggle to breathe.
Something is jolted in me and I feel the intense bobs of my shoulders and breasts as I race down the stairs and back up, fire extinguisher in hand.
I'm still floating, though. With smoke darkening around me and embers flickering like early-evening fireflies in the countryside. My hands struggle to trigger the lever that would allow this experience to come to a close — I can't quite access the right amount of pressure. I don’t have access. A sudden panic drops me into my body and I realize just how much air I don't have to breathe, how much of this smoke is in me;
how much of the old me is still in me.
From somewhere within the desire for new, or the detestation of old, I find the strength to provoke a release of white foam and I watch as the room goes silent. I see it before I hear it, the white noise of the white foam putting an end to the intensity I was engulfed in. I engulfed myself in…
It's easy to feel like it's a dream, what I'm experiencing. And I struggle to accept this degree of self-endangerment.
I struggle to admit I enjoy being so close to the edge, allowing my feelings to rise to surface, ready to disgorge themselves all the way out of me and avalanche to the ground, a magma spread into rubble that can be used to create something new.
But this is how I feel.
And perhaps even though I'm nearly incapacitated from the smoke inhalation, and there remains a black hole painted on the ceiling from the flames my flames, I feel a small nugget of newness somewhere in here. Inside me.
…
I will have to recover physically, I've already come to terms with this, so let's not discuss that. My house is a mess and my body is healing, but I… the true me… I am inspired. I imagine how dark it must have been inside this body that it took that much light, that much heat, to soften me and clear the path so warmth could shine through…
I'm instantaneously sad for the old me, still struggling to breathe as I lay on this bed. The comforter was always a little bit scratchy, so there is that slight discomfort.
Have I always been living with just a slight discomfort? Scratching at the edges of my being…slowly burning the fringes of my way?
Oh, the insights from mama. They just keep dawning on me.
Perhaps I'll lay here and relax. Perhaps sleep. Tomorrow is another day.
