I love fire more than anything in the world and that's what I let my friend know. I released about a hundred fire lanterns when she moved away because I wanted to convince her to stay. I couldn't just call her and beg, I couldn't pack my own bags and tell her that I'd go where she goes, I couldn't accept and move on. I'm not about all that. Besides, fire is the only thing I love. I eat from the stove, sleep next to a hearth because my walls are thin as teeth, take the sun for a walk every day it comes looking. So naturally, all I could do was send her fire too. Rice paper fire lanterns, that's what, because the very last thing she ever said to me was:
"We'll find each other again, I'm sure."
And these lanterns, they're not endless, they're supposed to land. She'll know for sure when she finds a half-smashed up, half- inflated, half-bashed-in cube that it's from me. Because I love fire and how it makes everything so pretty, how it paints ricepaper orange, how it licks it gold. That's what I thought when I stood by the river night after night, while my matches lit the rocks, the reed and the ripples on the water into shades of yellow and bronze.
Now of course, fire is difficult to grasp. My very first lanterns dropped dead in the water. And sometimes, the lanterns wouldn't fly, so I just stood there, crumpling the light fabric and my face into a warmth that felt like a fist, purely with my own frustration. Strangely enough, those lanterns grew into blocks, into actual horse-heavy cubes of scalding heat, and I was forced to drop them into the water too. But these didn't sink or lie limp, they kept floating on the river as I thought about the water life. I thought:
"What if they reach the ocean, will the coral sink them? Or keep them alive?"
As you know, fire lanterns are supposed to fly, farther and farther up until you have to go back inside because the wind makes your arms feel too chilly. But even though I managed to keep a few lanterns flying, I ended up becoming more and more fascinated with the lantern cubes instead. I had no idea how a thing so heat-infested could survive on the back of its natural enemy. And most of all I wondered whether they would ever reach my friend through the water streams, instead of through the air which could drop a lantern onto her head any time.
Like I said, every night I tried to tell her how much I loved fire, how much I needed it to stay-- warm, of course, stay warm-- while Winter came along, while the sun started visiting less frequently. But one day I had used my last few matches for my last batch of fire lanterns, which meant my hearth was more quiet than usual, my stove bleaker than I wished for.
And that's when I saw something through the window glass: a curtain of orange, yellow, bronze and gold light climbing through the air to my storey. I opened up my window, an enormous radiance of heat enveloped my face, and down on the pavement I saw a sight which stunned my shivering completely. A whole parade of my lantern cubes, swimming into little pools of water right up to my front door. Maybe that's what the coral had done, or maybe that's what loving fire did, maybe it let you know that something always would come back.
