Fire and Rain

The sky is near tears today.

I get so tired of all of this. This thinking, this reasoning, this constant voice.

There is no quieting it for now. I grow tired of my own company and reach out. I listen to their stories and carry them home with me. I take them to the place where everything lives and they crowd in and raise their voices too.

I dream in houses and turns and twists and unexpected rooms. I wake screaming with the horror of the lights turned on and the room suddenly empty. Something dark has leaped in the window and snatched important people from me. I choke and startle and creep shaking through real darkened hallways to check breathing forms, undisturbed in slumber by my cries. I can't shake the feeling that something is missing and bury myself in a book to forget.

The waking nightmare is that it's all slipping away from me. That my charade will end and no one will guess the answers and I will stand there, foolish; sweating and miming the actions of a real life. There's an empty room where I store up all the words. It echoes with forever. It hisses to me from behind a closed door and my lesser self wants to toss a match, lit and careless, and see it all consumed. I want to walk amid the silent ashes of it all and listen to the dampened quiet that follows disaster.

Sometimes the cheerful flame by which they warm their hands and light their ways is just the reflection of a conflagration that devours a soul. The safety glass holds and their distance is safe and they can't hear the screams. They don't smell the melting tallow and the burning hair. A fire that burns and burns and burns and never fully consumes. I explain to them that the forest sometimes needs to burn and that we are the interlopers. They look around, confused; their forest isn't burning. I am grateful they can't feel the heat. The gentle rain on its way will do nothing to assuage the flames, though. Only add to the hissing, the nonstop background crackling din of potential energy released into nothingness and smoke.

These are the demons who speak to me. The ones that sit in the base of my skull, just below my right ear lobe. I can feel them there like a presence in the room sometimes. They fog my words as they come out, the take the meanings and intentions of my surroundings and smear them with oil; distorted, out of shape, grotesque. They tell me the things no one else will admit and so I trust them. I believe they are my friends, the only truth speakers on the days when the mirror lies and the voices of love and affection drop quietly to the ground. Matter of fact, pitiless, and full of the confidence that comes with proclaiming half-truths.

It is not all beautiful. There are these days that come. The days that the sky is near tears. The high pressure areas have relented and the clouds and I cry in the sudden release. It was unnatural, you know. Out of season, all that brightness. Too vivid and perfect and burning up the grass; blinding enough to believe that it could always be that way. It's beautiful in its way. It has to be. I pledged my allegiance to this kind of beauty years ago. The shadows illuminate the smile. They must be there, the relief of an etching, the texture in the landscape.

I get tired of all this, though. I get tired of renaming the ugly as beautiful, for excusing the softness that forms, easily damaged. I grow so weary of redefining, rearranging, wandering shamelessly into light. The fire rages on and blackens what it licks. It will regenerate. The phoenix will rise and the lupines will bloom again. I know this. I get tired of this knowing. This thinking, this reasoning, this containing. Were it only I to consider I would cry a new Dead Sea and lie back; let the salt water hold me for a while.


*Author's note: Lest you fear for my sanity, I am working on a series of free write exercises over different topics. I was named after James Taylor's Fire and Rain and that was the inspiration for this post. This is not a confessional, nor is my blog my personal diary.