The fire is loved when I throw myself towards it.
I can’t imagine trying to get satisfaction any other way, nails to the turning edge of a grindstone. There I am, in that sparking place. Where the world is dark and velveteen and the crickets sing low through the summer heat. Wrapped around the magic center, spinning at a million miles, using the soft of my intestines as a pillow.
Forgive the match, and the torch, and the hand that unites the two. I will burn off the dry parts later to reveal a new form, pink and raw. That’s all I do in this life, burn to reach a magic center. Forgiving the vultures, the sun, and the growing pains. Ive done what i’ve ought to.
In this way, my actions are both selfish and impersonal. I do what I do to burn. I do what I do for the sake of the burning, purely for its maintenance. The center spins me around itself, burning me to keep itself alight. Split but never destroyed. Perfectly magnetic, bending the world to its weight.
With such a word as “burning,” suffering is easily assumed. But pleasure is found with each spark from the welder’s torch, and wherever the slag falls, I find myself laughing. Pain bends itself over and becomes an awful, delicious pleasure. A sharp delight, ice water in a cavity.
Is this pure- or a perverse adaptation for my soul’s survival? Burning requires everything from me. I relish giving. Whatever blisters is worth the tears.
For fuel, I have used the standard: wood, paper, gasoline, lint, revenge, dreams, success, fantasies in general, notebooks, and images of things I refuse to become. All of these have worked, none of these have lasted forever, and I do much work in tending to coals and embers.
Coals and embers require scrutiny to continue burning. A constant weighing of word against action. I can smell my own hypocrisy, however faint, and it makes me ill. Luckily, the light has never gone out despite my tendencies to stay and leave for temporary pleasures.
There is a layer of delicate lace knitted over each of my pupils, obscuring me from the world. Every edge is fuzzy and tinged with white, and although I know not what it is, I cling to the objective (sometimes stoking the coals with bare hands). Something there. Something exists, both within and without. I do my best to keep my sights focused, even with the aching thumbs.
Sometimes, when lying on my back waiting for sleep, I feel the years coming on through a cold steel barrel, a heat-seeking truth I am unable to evade. It is those days, when, sweaty and anxious, I come to the realization that the day that ends in a restless sleep, I have failed to touch forever. I have ignored my one purpose of wrapping myself around that glowing core and burning alongside it. Even a moment is enough, a song, a dance, fifteen minutes staring into the wind. I haven’t decided for myself whether this is an in or out thing. Its experience is both and neither; it wriggles out from understanding and leaves glistening trails all over the imagination. You require my allegiance. In that I entirely give, I cannot sustain without belief.
And then there is this simple fact: had there been no magic core, I would be worth nothing. Without it, I sputter around a pool of stinking ash, hoping for water to ignite. That core, I did not make; I had no hand in its birth. There is no capability of my imagination that could possibly conceive of something divine without already having had a shard of it dwelling within me. It burned before I threw myself upon its pyre, and it will continue to burn long after. And others will come, as others had before I . And after that too, after the word for fire has been replaced and our language has been poured into a new mold, there will be souls who draw themselves to this flame.
I dislike the word obsession. Its use implies a captivity, a one-sided nature wherein the object of obsession holds every ounce of power over the obsessed. One lives and dies by an obsession; there is no forever, no immortal flame.
Once the light of obsession dies, the soul dies with it; there is a grief that stamps its territory and makes its camp there. From that camp, the obsessed individual makes his war plans against the object of his obsession and against the world that allows him not only to be obsessed but also to refuse to understand his endless pining. He has not felt warmth; his blood moves by cruel magic, and not a tender muscle. Obsession, this is the furthest thing from burning- although the intensity may be parallel.
This is different. This is not a good fire. This is not a destructive fire; this is a fire that confuses me, but a fire I have accepted as my raison d’être. I keep it going; it keeps me warm.
No, there is in fact a devotion. I feed and I am fed. The tree eats the rotten fruit it drops around its ankles, and from itself it regrows. I am provided for as the light swells.