Flickering Fear

She had never feared fire.

Maybe fear isn’t the right word. She wasn’t an idiot; she was still aware that the flames could burn her, hurt her. She was moderately careful as a result, though she didn’t flinch when the campfire blew towards her. Didn’t hesitate to run across the hot coals that night on the beach. Didn’t turn down the opportunity to feed more wood into the fire’s crackling mouth.

Her parents thought her naïve, but she knew better than to listen.

She once told me that a sense of calm washed over her when she watched the flames. The kind of calm her friends got when they watched their favorite movie or listened to a song they knew by heart. Like nothing in the world could burn her. She told me that she could unfocus her eyes on a flickering candle and let her thoughts gently drift into another universe full of living constellations.

I laughed when she told me this. I thought she was crazy to claim such a feeling for heated energy. Regret fills me to confess this, but there was a time that I thought she was lying to get attention. She wasn’t the most popular girl at our school. Her face was like the default setting for average looking teen, which made her easy to overlook in a crowded hallway or unrecognizable when you saw her at the store. She wouldn’t have been the first to try and be dramatically different from everyone else so she could gobble up leftover stares. This all seems so uncharacteristic for her now that I’m writing it down. She was strange, sure, but she was never starved for attention. She was completely content on being… well, just being. Not sparing a thought on who they wanted her to be and rather being who she was.

I guess that’s why she did it.

She ran back into that building before anyone could process what was happening. While I couldn’t even see through the smoke pouring from the windows, she didn’t hesitate to dive into the haze. Sometimes I wonder why she did it, how she was remotely close to having enough bravery to get that little boy. He told me later that she was calm. That everything about her was completely relaxed up until her last second. Not the kind of calm like someone resigned to the grasp of death, but like she knew this was her story. Like fate had shown her the path of flame and ash it layed out for her.

The school went through its grief relatively quickly; she had just been another face in the yearbook, after all. Everything seemed to move on without missing a beat, but for some reason I can’t get her face out of my head. Can’t forget the reflection of the bonfire that danced in her milky eyes.

So now I’m the first one to run through the coals. I stare back at the flames as the breeze pushes them towards me. I toss the logs into the fire and smile as sparks hiss and rise to the dark sky. I try, with all my might, to not be afraid of getting burned.

Because even though I’ve already forgotten her name, I want to be the one to dance in the flames instead of watching from the ashes.

In loving memory of Marie and Andrew Anderson