Flames — A Story of Summer
I pick up a sock and brush away a blade of grass, dry and brown. I smile softly before placing it in the washing basket. It’s been 3 days since I left the field and the smell of smoke no longer lingers on my skin like a dusty veil. My freckles begin to fade, as rapidly as the ruby red henna patterns looping my feet.
This summer, I have been revitalised by fire. I long for the lick of the flame and the glow of the ember as night draws around me each night. When I feel lost again I return in my dreams, to feel the warm pulse on my skin.
I remember how the wind whirled around us as we sat in the shadow of Charles’ Fort. The mist came in off the sea. It was a heavy, damp blanket settling on our shoulders. We fumbled with cardboard and twigs, puffing and huddling. I was giddy by that fire, lightheaded. We told silly stories and blushed with a heat. We cooked a bland lentil stew and ate like kings and queens. The fire burned on, steady and strong.
In Manchester, I sat by the fire and laughed until my tears formed rivulets and clouded my vision. The smoke was heady and thick, dirtying my wet cheeks. I warmed my toes, bare and brown as my friendship flickered in the night. My throat was dry for companionship until I sat by that heartening blaze.
By that same fire, I saw the face of a boy illuminated. He, no stranger to the wild, told me of his escape under a short yet gaping stretch of sea. I, dumbfounded, could only listen. The burn of the flame spoke of his pain, but I could not hope to understand. He, a refugee and I, astonished. I was choked, whether by smoke or by sorrow for the cruelty of the human condition.
In the field, I was nourished by fire. An early morning in the dew of the dawn, followed by an evening under a canopy of stars. Voices and laughter mingled with dense air, adding more and more heat to our sun-soaked days. There, I craved silence between sweet songs. I stuck my toes in the cinders, closer until they tingled. I crackled and sparked, restlessly.
I watched the flames leap as the drumbeat swelled and I thought of our inner wildness. I felt my bare skin smart under an open sky and turned this way and that. I stood in the cold and looked at the heat, the waves of the silhouettes and the bodies. I cried for the complexity of our world and thought of those first Sapiens and their flint with no idea what was to come. I cried for the lost companionship and the healing that fire brought. I cried for the fatal romanticism of our habitation in that field.
I am entranced by those fires and their freedom and wildness. I wonder about their taunting us, we, the architects of our own destruction. I wonder what it is that I believe, then I think of those flames. Fire, so tangible yet mystical, magical, deadly. Foolish we were, to transcend those boundaries past the physical into the imaginary. Is it an accident, that we stumbled into this power? Yet, when the fire is lit and we sing, it speaks of beginnings and ends. I am reminded of how brief a flicker we were, are, and will be.
While the four walls contain me I feel asleep. When I smell that familiar scent of smoke and dirt clinging on my clothes I am reminded of my brief wakefulness, my natural, raw nakedness.
