Fires

I’ve been thinking a lot about fire these days; where it is, and where it isn’t. How it can be explosive or invisible, deadly or life-sustaining, deep orange or almost-white yellow. No boundaries.

Fever is a symptom, not a disease. Fever is fire in costume: a tiny pool at the top of the sternum, red cheeks, moppy hair. This pandemic causes a fever that gathers slowly and hovers, playing tag with shivering limbs. There are people alight with this invisible fire right now. Maybe next door. Maybe a thousand miles away. There’s no way to know for sure where they are, but they aren’t here.

There are buildings on fire. The pictures show afternoon sunlight through a haze of smoke and gas. Others show scenes at night: the skeletal limbs of a police station, a hollow, dark sky, flames reaching ever upward and outward. Then there is the morning: ashes, broken glass, disbelief. And still the anger, both the symptom and the disease.

Here the fires are contained in small containers one can purchase at Home Depot. They are lit with plastic lighters on Saturday nights after burgers, and friends sit around them in orderly circles to talk about how life is different these days. Maybe they cook marshmallows until they catch fire and enjoy the simplicity of extinguishing the fire with one simple breath. Zoey asked me why water makes the fire go away and not her breath. I’m not a person who knows these kinds of things. But I tell her that it has something to do with oxygen. Breathing air into a fire only gives it fuel, and when the fire gets too big, not even water can suck the life out of it.

The night my grandmother died in January, there was no snow, and we took an evening walk in just our sweatshirts. The sky was a deep orange, the kind of sky we usually see in the summer. The kind that glows like the last embers of a fire, the sun bending to a slow and peaceful goodbye. There have been nights like this in the last two months -- we have had an impossibly perfect spring. So many mornings that begin with clear, gentle sunlight and dewy lawns.  Very little oppressive heat or sloppy rainstorms. Open windows and cloudless skies, gentle winds. The summer wildfires will probably start soon out west, and they will carry on for days and months and the helicopters will release great curtains of water that bring no relief.  So many people find it so easy to create pretend comfort in this place and revel in what we think we’ve been spared.

Some days I can’t imagine getting out of bed. My daughter is on the other side of the bedroom door and there is work to do and people who depend on me, but the only thing that seems possible is to keep crying – sometimes heavily, other times soundlessly. Water is unpredictable, too. Zoey asks why I start crying in the middle of a story about a young girl who learns to be a scientist, and although I might be able to explain the sadness if I had some time it was not predictable. But while unpredictability chips away at my sense of how the world works, I look out the window and see brilliant sunshine that is haunted by something only I can see.

Whatever fire other people have right now, I don’t have it. Not the real fire, not the invisible fire, not the fire of anger or fire of hatred. I have the privilege to step outside of my life and say I’m objectively luckier than most, and the privilege to have the time to feel guilty and depressed about it. Of course I don’t want to have a deadly fever or witness violent protests by angry mobs, or be run out of my house by a wildfire. But I hate the feeling of existing in a world separate from one that matters. I hate how invisible I feel, how my world feels manufactured and pretend, hate the blurry contrast between the reality I read about and the reality on my doorstep. I feel so fucking crazy, as if there is no way to contain what I’m feeling, but it’s not like a fire in my belly. It’s a slow, swallowing wave, tucking me under its curl and gently pushing me down to the depths of the dark sea.

I suppose some people have panic attacks and they feel like they are catching fire. Or like fire shooting through the veins. It’s not like that for me. For me it’s the absence of fire; my blood begins to feel thick and heavy, throbbing and churning, a thousand tiny rivers about to swell their banks and drown the world. It is slow and measured and deliberate in its control. I wish there were a fire big enough to dry up the sad reservoirs in my brain.  

I’ve started watching Normal People for the fourth time, because it offers me the peace of a good heat, the way people describe deftly created barbecue. The fire of impossible first love, the rage that comes from mistakes made and mistakes made against you, the burn of betrayal and the brilliant sunshine of renewal. But after six episodes I stand up and the world spins. I am almost 40, and I love my husband deeply. But we are beyond the fire of high school first-love (or did I ever feel that way about anyone? I think now I was just in love with the fact that it was possible I’d feel that way at some point in the distant future) and the wounds we give each other don’t inspire forgiveness that turns into physical passion. We support each other and weather storms together and we give each other space and sometimes we push each other away and there is frustration and hurt and fear but there is no fire. I’m lonely for the time of possibilities that is in some ways long gone but in some ways was still here as early as January. I’m lonely for the people we were, and how those people might have survived this fire differently.  I'm lonely for all the people I've never been and might never get to be, and for the versions of me that felt the fire of hope and anger and love every second of every day.