"PEOPLE COME IN AND OUT OF MY LIFE LIKE WILDFIRE"
[4/5/2025]Title is a play on lyric from "HOT BURNING STONE" by Jordaan Mason and Their Orchestra.
Art by my wonderful friend and fantastic artist Linen Burrows of The Goblin Burrows (@thegoblinburrows.gay)
A private moment. A quiet full of uncertainty; completely unsure of the nature of the words I write, sharing them openly, publicly, but really to no one soul in particular. No names come to mind and no faces appear in my peripheral vision as I write today. I am empty but not hollow - like a stream appearing out of nowhere, trickling in-between dry rocks, strange words emerge as the temperature rises, unexpectedly, unknown but refreshing, returned; not as if they were lost or gone or in drought, but instead a pleasant surprise of their coming without expectation of when they'd come flowing again. The glacier melts and new feelings - new responsibilities - arise with the changing of the seasons and exchanging of the keys between them. A clock turns but no numbers are borne on its face; just weathered marks where the implications of touch, of hands, may have once been.
I have to remind myself many days that, though patterns arise as the cosmic clock shifts alongside the internal, historical one, that they move at different paces wholly separate from one another. They may appear as though one may affect the other and vice-versa, that opposite is not quite true. There is no concise pattern to my life in the cosmic sense - not one that can be measured out with needles and compasses and barometers and weather-vanes, but one that is constantly defined only by the words I know and cling to so dearly, always so readily and excitedly waiting for the next moment I am able to stick them cleanly onto the things I see. That utterly human folly of wanting to define with shape and labels what is messy, unknowable, unbound, untethered to any singular definable experience, real, alive.
I try not to cage my thoughts with too many definitions and names nowadays. I feel it clogs the heart to do so; it bears it down from flying free and reaching new heights of fleeting feeling with its grievous weight and confused corridors of semantics. And though I love to play openly with semantics (especially with others), I've lost my taste for them when I am alone. Semantics I feel are most useful when trying to understand the unknowable life of another, bridging the gap with language what cannot be felt with warm breath, laughter, tears, and song. But language does so alone, being a last resort, even as it is used so liberally.
The infinite resource of words and its plethora of the implications of knowledge still cannot completely describe the space between bodies. The sharp and distinct moments, the existential times when there is no time, only experience. The moments where, for a brief but infinitely long period, where someone's eyes glint with nature, with the distilled essence of their being. It's my folly, then, that when I know those moments come to me so briefly, that sometimes instead of cherishing these moments for revealing this individuality that I always try to find, so desperately clawing at it like a starved animal, in all things and all doings, for its oneness comparative to anything and everything, gratified that I was able to glance at that holy light so bright for but a moment that it could blind me, that I instead all at once resort to the hubris of trying to define myself within or contrast myself against that individuality when I come so close to it, like I am afraid and unsure of my own. Or maybe, that I cherish the individuality of the momentary nature of the reveal itself more than the individual nature of the people and things and life so singular and unknowable in depth and emotion that is found within the moment itself.
I ramble. I ramble on and on with words about what I know surrounds me, surrounds all of us, and is the constant state of the world itself to be filled with life yet I fill it with words instead. Then I think I may attempt to use words to define words too. Do I treat them like dead things, things that have passed, things that stand like tall dark graves on top of experiences that would have returned to the earth naturally had not that heavy slab been placed over them, saying "here lies a life that once was, but now stands unchanging?" Or should they also be treated like living things, running free from us as they escape our mouths, beautiful that they were said and returned from our minds and into the air once more? Do the words lay dead when they reach the page, when they are read by others? And do the experiences we share lay dead when they are painted with the language so unable to reach the exact point we are trying to make with them, making ghosts that wander the halls in circular thought, trapped, unresolved, unable to change? Or are they free in tandem with one another, in their changing, in their meaning?
Maybe I ask myself these questions because I am so unsure of myself. If there's one thing I now know, in contrasting myself and in being told directly by many people whose opinions of me and my doings are so valuable to me, is that I am unsure of myself. I question myself and my internal world more than I question the world around me. I suppose that's the result of formative years spent not having a self or sense of self thereof, is much ado about nothing (at least nothing worthwhile and nothing real in the literal sense, though maybe more or less so in the metaphorical and philosophical sense). Call it dysmorphia, call it stunted growth, call it trauma, call it whatever one wants. I'm tired of calling it anything at all. I'm tired of calling it and recalling it, trying to paint pictures of scenes from a movie I saw only once and couldn't let go of. The picture degrades and I forget it freely. But maybe it's not enough; I needed new things to feel, to cherish them and forget them all the same. Dead memories and the colour of grief / won't you help us to make it real?
I was warned of all this. And I didn't listen.
Didn't listen.
I caught a glimpse of myself. And I fell right in.
I fell right in.
The earth fell out from under me.
A wildfire - a single spark grows into something bright and catastrophic at the same time. It consumes everything in the landscape, coming quietly, then all at once, changing the nature of the land at all once. It roars with fury, it strikes fear, it is all-encompassing, often inescapable before its too late. It never comes expectedly. And it never ends expectedly either; sometimes the sparks and smoke catch currents on the wind and travel to far horizons to burn even brighter, clearing out the built-up fuels and dead brush that needed to go, destined to be forgotten, to be given back to time, to the earth, to the air, in flame. Other times it fizzles out as quickly as it comes with torrential rain, or maybe it stays just a little longer, burning underneath the black ash and remains. But always, it is singular. There's no room for anything but the one fire, in its awe-inspiring heat and power, only to be seen once when spark and fuel meet together in harmful harmony with one another.
And then when it's gone, there is nothing. Nothing left of what was old remains in definable shape, or can be salvaged. But all is not lost. What remains is fertile soil to regrow another, stronger, new forest, new prairie, new range, grown gratefully though slowly from the old growth which is now gone. And maybe, when everything is regrown, when the flowers bloom and the trees gnarl with age, when the grasses grow long and dry and reaches towards the sky maybe out of some desire to touch the burning sun and feel its infinite warmth and kindness and gift of life, a new fire will come and do it all over again. This terrifying nature. Uncontrollable. Necessary. Beautiful. Free.