When There's Nothing Left to Burn

You have to set yourself on fire.

I ended last year in a sea of people with her mouth on my mouth, and strangers’ bodies holding me upright. Champagne in my veins like I’d never be human again. In the morning we both put on my skin to sit across from each other in a booth, with our faces and our hands.

But last year doesn’t matter when I’m making my blood sing, and baby girl is aura dancing with a blue-suited boy, and the new moon, and 3am, and, and. 2014 bloomed my pupils supernova while sound ricocheted off my bones in a living room full of people. My body far away staring at each human being thinking I love you, I love you, I love you. My heart aching with the weight of them pressing hard into each other pressing hard into the future.

A moment: everything slowed and sharpened. Broken glass and champagne fractured across hardwood, a girl propped against the refrigerator fighting gravity, a boy’s gaping mouth and fluttering eyelids. Everything trembling. Everything delicate like walking on a razorblade.

Then sound.

Then turning.

Then fire cracking a Christmas tree’s spine, climbing into black like the summer we piled into her car. Whose car? Some car, fourorfive of us. I was in the backseat, middle, feet on the console. We took the scenic route into hell.

Everything burned that year; fire in the hills, fire in the mountains. Fire creeping up the highways, traffic creeping down them. Fourorfive of us in that car. All eyes, bare skin, and pointing. Me in the middle of the backseat, recalling Dante’s circles of hell. Limbo, lust, gluttony. Everybody silent and staring, embers looking the way city lights look from airplanes. Greed, wrath, heresy. Double back on the disaster, slow like a smalltown parade. Violence, fraud. Wave for the crowd. Hold our breath like driving past a cemetery. Treachery. The best hells are the ones you exit unscathed, but everything burned that year.

This is not a metaphor

Now. Sound, and turning and a tree spitting flames like a fucking phoenix. A semi-circle of bodies all wide eyes/open mouths/pointing. My eyes drinking in these people, these goddamn humans that I love. Everybody looking so perfect I could cry. Tomorrow in the dark, when the sad sinks into that writing place, I’ll remember the wet of their eyes catching firelight.

But tonight I am telling a stranger I want to live in the city. What city? New York. I don’t realize it’s true until it’s spoken and I’m embarrassed by the sincerity. I know it’s a cliché, but…She says every writer needs a story. She says nothing has to be forever. She’s from the east coast, looking for her heart out west. Now a girl with earnest hands saying, I know I’m young but, but nothing darling. Sing your old soul onto the dance floor.

Now my two feet walking toward the door, Allison navigating us home. Puddling into her bed, her body sighing Too beautiful, too beautiful. What is? The world. And everything is too much, and not enough; perfectly imperfect. So I hold her, hollowing my body into a bowl for her emotions. We’ll examine them beneath the skylight while the neighbor builds an ark, his nail gun shattering dawn like a gunshot light bulb. We’ll sink back into our skin, swathe our tongues in new silences, and step into the howbig world of a new year.  

“I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”

— Virginia Woolf

All my love.

-b