Outside from where I sit, smoke hovers in the air like silt. The sky is not blue, nor white, nor gray, rather it is the color of chalk and ash and grave, a composite of pulverized forests and the bones that once lived inside them. The sky is form, rendered anew by wildfires, acres and acres of hot lashing flames ravaging the status quo of our western lands.
What sparked—the question is loaded—these fires? Consider the litany of possibilities: heat, drought, wind, a seed of flame on tinder, human carelessness, a wave of electric current from the sky. A storm. A storm, I believe, is the only answer. The destruction is grand, yes, but don’t all destructions begin as a cell? A crack of lightning, friction startled to life by opposing charges, or a strike of match ignited by the dexterity of human hands—atoms bonded with other atoms—cells which spark fires that spread like fever along the coastline.
***
How might one describe a storm? Do they have colors? Do they bend and twist, or breathe? Do they hold onto memories and annihilate the world around them in an attempt to lighten the load? Do they punish or seek revenge? Do they cry? What would the world be without storms?
***
My mind leaps to winter. How I want the suffocating silence of snow to heave its weight onto the burning lands. How I want to listen: ice to spark, sizzle, gone. I have always wanted what I could not have. A storm inside the mind is not so different from a wildfire. The burn renders ash and grave from the way things could be, erasing what was, scarring what could never return.
I, too, have felt the heat. Fear distorted my vision, caused me to see what was not there. Perhaps, I refer to my innocence, of longing to escape the lifespan of a vulnerable season. Power, a lovely force and a source of awe from a distance, was not the same up close. Crackle, spit, and snap. I fueled the fire with my bones, my hands, my mind fearing what it would not overcome. Stay close, back off. One day, it was my prerogative. Another day, it was his.
Photo: Benjamin Lizardo/Unsplash
