A Ritual Of Fire And Bridges

For what it’s worth, the first time around is never the best. People say it is, but that’s a legend that grew from late night discussions back when authors could speak without permission. They’d sit around a fire in the woods with their mouths full of ideas and whiskey, and bask in the critical fluency of accolades as darkness rolled a refer.

Richard Garrison knew the truth. He had been one of them, back when to summon his spirit he only had to take a swig or two, and pound his chest. The wilderness inside him savaged his temper with its howls of night.

He was a god.

Made of brittle excuses.

His breath full of the past.

It was a lovely past, as pasts go. He had charged the enemy on an island well known for its last stands, its decrepit holdouts from another age who couldn’t let go of their war, and for its artillery music.

A lovely past. One without a future.

Richard Garrison knew. He had sat with his friends around a fire. They needed to live a life not their own. And take care to save their own. Their existence. Cover it in symbols. Breathe its dust.

All of them carried grand pencils and reams of paper. All dreamed of days without regret. Whiskey rivers ran down the canyons of their throats, and called forth their stature and courage.

They believed in miracles.

Miracles that flew from pen to paper to the ear.

Ones that changed the world.

Filled it with love and understanding.

The first time was always best, they claimed when the fire spit sparks, but time crept from its crypt, as it loves to do, and shot their theories down with its eternity. The first time a baby walks, it falls. The first time a man kills another, he weeps. There is no going back.

Richard Garrison left the fire one night. He half drunk stumbled from the light. His ritual was one of pure bodily need when the bushes beckoned, but alone for a moment in the stillness he realized that something was wrong. His words fell from his hand burnt and battered. His paper boat manuscripts glided in gutters.

Richard! cried a voice from the fire, and Richard came back. But his perception had changed. He saw his friends as friendly foes. Their faces glowed, but they would not serve him.

Not have him.

Be one with him.

Alone as one must, Richard Garrison cauterized his wounds in the only way he knew as he said goodbye amid ghosts of friends in a time when authors still spoke of truths that had fallen from fashion. His friends as foes looked at Richard, as if on a weak bridge and unsure of their footing.

It was a long way down to the depths.

A ritual that could not be observed.

When friends depart and the lights go out.

When smoke smothers the logs.

Back in the city, with its beautiful ocean and bay, Richard bought a car, a handsome machine of foreign metal and exotic gearshifts. At night, he drove from bar to bar, and asked each girl he met if he could speak into her mouth and breathe into her lungs the taste of success and defeat, and if he could touch her womb with a metaphor of madness, and if he could paint the back of her neck with unimpeachable truths of what is and what isn’t, and if he could please just tap an odd rhythm with his fingers on the table while she sang his restlessness to peace.

Some said yes.

Others, no.

A few called the cops or the bouncer.

It didn’t matter to Richard Garrison. He could leave them in silence, return to his car, make the engine growl, caress the exotic gearshifts, and drive through the yellows and greens of a city made of hills and half truths and uncooked pieces of hope.

And he did. He drove. Past the dark pawn shops, abandoned towers.

Richard came to the bay, stopped his handsome machine of foreign metal, got out. The bay sliced the city in two with its great curved black blade. On one side lived buoyant people who played by the rules. On the other, those who still spoke the old firelight language of wisdom. It seemed a gulf too wide to cross.

A golden bridge span glittered in the night, a connector of suspended cable and belief. A marvel of engineering. It reigned over the water, and cast invitations from its footpaths to view the heights. Many would, Richard thought. Many did. They walked to the middle and never came back. They wasted their talent on drugs, their beauty on dreams.

One could contemplate here.

See blackness and light.

Feel the ocean breeze.

Raise their head to heavens.

Beg forgiveness.

One could ask the dead at their hands to rise from islands past, where the surf had buried their need for grief, create a stroll on the sidewalk again, stroke colors on a canvas, give a homeless man a roof.

It all happened here. Not the first time, as the legends declared, or the second, as they prayed. The ritual took place over a lifetime of wrong turns into ghettos, right turns into lanes of love, and with an undefended heart.

No shortcuts came for Richard. They didn’t take his hand and lead him to the crater where hard packed understanding huddled. They didn’t flash his eyes with neon promises.

Call him brilliant.

Or mad.

Or speak of easy fortune.

The world was bigger than that. Richard Garrison opened his mouth to swallow its language, a tongue that spoke of expanses in a time when narrow judgments ruled the world.

It was his ritual, his ceremony of passage.

A bloody sacrament.

More words than he could hold.

More belief than he could fathom.

Richard walked out on the bridge, and from a gracious height saw far ships, and to the north, beacons to keep them safe from shores. He stood there and watched the dark horizon that never tired of gulping the sea.

This was his place.

Of solitude. Of worship.

Now he could make something new.

Fresh. Helpful.

Now the past could turn to the trees and die.