The Fire

You're here and they know it. They saw you walk in and now they're pretending they didn't. You feel your face flush hot - dear god, don't let this happen now.

You were nine years old the first time it struck - on stage, bright lights, a dozen little girls lined up in a row. A heat like you had never felt before, sparked in your toes, burned through your veins and rose up to your face like a screaming red lightbulb.

Sound the alarm, call in for backup - you are never setting foot near a spotlight again.

Completely divorced from your peripheral vision, you look only straight ahead now. There's no looking back. Anything but forward is absolutely out of the question.

If your body is your home, then your house is on fire. With a mouth that tastes like burning flesh, you are cooking from the inside out.

You've seen them all whisper. You can't make out the words but the message is loud and it is clear. They've heard the stories  and they know, trust me, they KNOW. Everyone knows and here you are now, walking, and they're watching -- watching the girl who walks really weird. And that's not even the tip of the iceberg, that may as well be an ice cube in the middle of the ocean.

It's over for you - all of it, everything. One look in your direction and the entire world comes crashing down.

How much heat can the human face produce and then possibly withstand? Thanks to you, we're about to find out, right here, right now, in the middle of this party. A socioscientific experiment, starring you and only you. Everyone else is just here to observe.

But it must have felt so good, in that moment, your face, red hot, for radically different reasons than you've ever experienced before.  Perfectly peaked, but in a prettyish way. Sick. Love sick. Love starved for that matter.

You timed it - you and he held direct, uninterrupted eye contact for sixty-five seconds straight - over a minute. You've never  even managed to go that long alone in front of  the bathroom mirror. It was the best sixty-five seconds of your entire life, especially considering what happened next. And yes, they know. Of course they know, we all know and the sooner you accept that, the sooner we can ALL just move on with our lives.

A roasted pig with a tomato face, skewered on a spit, well past curfew on a Tuesday night. You are not the girl to take to homecoming and you know that. You belong under the bleachers, on the visitors side, discarded nachos and uneaten butts of hot dog buns, on a bed of abandoned, cheap plastic cushions, emblazoned with the names of long-forgotten losing teams.

There wasn't even a game that night, so why would anyone think to go there? But we know why - Mr. Way Out Of Your League himself, shining and handsome, whisked you away to the one place he knew there'd be no one around. No eyes to witness, no lights to illuminate, no cameras to record anything at all. It's far too dark to see down there and he knows you're way too self-conscious to make THAT kind of sound.

And there was never any chance that you, with that body, in all it's ripened glory, would ever be permissed  to leave burn marks, or skid marks, or whatever it is that IT does, or might possibly leave behind.

He JUST got the Jeep for his birthday and there is no way in hell he ever intended to let you, of all people, be naked in his brand new backseat.

Your prince laid you down in a pile of trash and what happened next must have left you starving for even a taste of those sixty-five seconds when you were a queen with her king, in the passenger seat, star-crossed lovers, twin flames finally reunited -- the absolute best, unequivocal, one minute and five seconds of your entire life. If you think about it, and you do, we All know you do - he tricked you, he had you, he hurt you and then he threw you away.

He told you he loved you and you actually believed him? Yikes. Wow.

So yeah, it would make sense that you're having trouble walking, considering all that you've been through.

I think that we can all agree that the world would be a much better place if people had more compassion, but they don't. And I know you've seen them laughing, trust me, we have all seen the laughing. You're not just being paranoid, the laughing is real. Seven or eight times out of ten - give or take, I've tried to count - if people are laughing, they are laughing at you.

He doesn't laugh though. Believe it or not, he's more embarrassed about it than even you should be. Not for what he did or how he did it - his mortification stems solely from the fact that it happened and that it happened with you. He didn't want anyone to know - trust me - he did NOT go bragging about it to his friends.

But here you are now with some kind of secret you're hiding, this, very, second. Nobody else in the entire world, let alone inside this room, right now, seems to see it. But I see you  - tiny  corners of your mouth, upturned ever so slightly, in a style reminiscent of a make-believe, undercover Cheshire Cat that we both must have seen in the very same dream.

You HAVE seen it. A hundred trillion people, maybe more - literally everyone who's  ever lived, is living now, and every single human being who will ever be born, live and die in the future - each is a tiny piece, a crucial key, perfectly molded into a singular shape. And when the grooves are put together, clicked in place like gears inside a clock, THAT is our Hail Mary Moment - our only chance to ever open the door.

Could life be a ceaseless, incessant, ever-expanding, all encompassing, microcosm of unexplainable, unrelated and inconsequential series of events?

Or is it possible there's a much larger picture, with infinite pieces, each with their own intricate, moving parts?

You would have to travel approximately five-hundred and twenty five point two billion miles from the Earth to ever even catch a hint that there is in fact an edge, or even a picture at all for that matter. We are in it and on it and so meticulously intertwined and woven like webs around it - there is no doubt about this - We. ARE. It.

But you don't need to see a picture to believe anymore. You've done it, you went there, you breathed it in your lungs as deep as you could, and you still tasted it on your tongue, for seven hours and twenty three minutes after  - you timed it. Not a single desire to wash your mouth out with soap, let alone even bother with toothpaste.

Your hair, your face, your waistline - those jeans you wore on Wednesday morning - the Christmas Day to your Tuesday late night Christening in the unforgiving early winter air. You're a ship that got hit - not by fists, no broken bottles, not a single well-wisher waved to you lovingly to send you off on your voyage far away from shore.

It was too cold for sunburns in late November in the suburbs, but somehow, on that night, pitch dark, limbs entwined, hair down, faces red, four hands held, no words needed said.

This first flameless fire, outside of your skin.

The trees - your veins - leaves orange and dead.

The cigarette butts and throwaway cans, a smuggled in flask - A Beautiful Man.

The grooves came together -  they click and then locked. The dial turned slowly like the face of a clock.

The warmth of the light through invisible skin - no eyes, so free, to Just. Fucking. Live.