I see fire. I have always seen fire. I have touched it. I have breathed it. I have felt its touch on my flesh. I have listened to its crackling depths from beds as vast as the ocean and as private as a surgical needle. I have yearned for it to grace me with what it knows and what I wish to know and what I want to forget so the memories become engulfed in those flames and it all goes up in smoke, smoke, smoke. I see fire and I hear water. I yearn for the ocean as my feet brush the fire-hot coals. I inhale smoke. I know it will kill me. I still do it. I still taste it on my tongue. I let it burn my hair and melt my eyes and swallow up my bones in a vortex of heat. Heat. Heat. Still, the soul is hungry, because it’s been avoiding the flames for so long. What do we do, as people, as makers, as fire starters, when our yearning to create our flames falls victim to the callings of other elements? Some people are meant to forge stone. Some are meant to curve the earth. Some are meant to drink in the water of the voices that leak into them since birth. Some are climbing the mountains of dreams they yearn for but never quite reach, because the harnesses strapped to their shoulders have already started to buckle and fall apart. Their rivals will claim that it’s useless. Their friends will make them new ones. And then they will climb again. Did I climb? I did. But I fell. I fell, because I was too fucking stupid to put on a harness. I didn’t want to wear a harness and yet I told myself over and over and over and over again that I didn’t belong on that mountain, in that race, climbing after the missing souls who either made it to the very top, or found themselves lost in the endless terrain of snow and devastation and the promise of THEY ARE GONE FOREVER, DON’T DO WHAT THEY DID, THEY CANNOT BE SAVED. I never wanted to save myself but I always wanted to taste the fire and drink the water and stomp the earth and cast the wind and feel what it’s like to be a mage of all things. I never wanted to save myself and that deeply cost me. I dove headfirst into the fire without knowing what the fire would gift me. The fire was ready for me but I wasn’t ready for its loving arms. The fire only burns you if you’re not ready to take it. The game of the storyteller is to go after what hits you. There is no such thing as discovery. There is only MAKING. Only CREATION. Only WRITING. Only BREATHING. Only pursuing and breaking and reinventing the cycle to make what you were always destined to make. But who am I to tell you that? Oh, right, I’m saying this to myself. I’m telling myself this because I have no choice but to look into the eyes of whatever god or universe or eternal force of judgment is out there and demand it to make me understand why my mind WEEPS and my teeth SHARPEN when my BODY and my WORK and my LIFE are chained in shining gold and feathery cotton. I look into the eyes of the monster and breathe its smoke because it wants me to taste it. It holds up a cup to me. I accept it, because I want to drink from it, but when I look inside the goblet—for that’s what it is, isn’t it?—and all I notice is ash. ASH. It laughs at me! “What did you do with your one, precious life, you fucking self-aggrandizing piece of shit?” It screams at me. I scream back. I drop the cup and let it shatter. Pieces scatter across the floor. It cuts my bare feet. Why are my feet bare? I wonder this every time—because this is not a one-time thing, and if you search for the fire and feel its tongue lashing your flesh and soul and mind, you know this, and you are walking through it now, and you are asking the same if not similar questions because how could you not—as I walk across empty stone and wish my calloused feet could make sense of the burns I don’t remember earning. Did I ever earn these burns, as a SEEKER OF FIRE who always felt the call towards those flames? Did I ever truly sink my teeth into the flesh of my BODY OF WORK? My stories that salivate for the paintbrush of my ego as it taunts me, celebrates me? The mirror of myself who loves to indulge as society points and screams and jeers that YOU MUST BE A NARCISSIST because you love to create for yourself? Am I? Is that who I am? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Is that so wrong, when all I wish to do is plunge and burn and unleash ashes of what I’m making to lay atop the gardens of others and encourage them to seek their own fire, too? If that is what narcissism is for the ARTIST and the WRITER and the MAKER and the LEADER and the other SEEKERS OF FIRE who create because they would fucking combust and die if they didn’t… then let. ME. BURN.
— Taylor Barnes.