bagheera

>> nostalgia

I was the match and you were the rock
Maybe we started this fire
- Things We Lost In The Fire by Bastille

The flames rose above the sky, ascending into fireworks that painted the sky in flashes of embers and dark smoke. The smoke that had managed to consume my entire life. Every room, every piece of furniture that my family had sat upon, every picture, every piece of clothing, every memory that had ever been created in this house was no more. Burnt by my will to forget, burnt by the fire of a future that could not bring this house into my life, in the past that I must leave behind but never forget.

The gasoline stained my hand from the can that was now probably melted into the wooden floorboards, my brother's lighter, the one I'd used to light the flame is now gone too. And so is my brother. My mother. My father. All that is left of this family, of this house, of this memory—is me. Little, beautiful, naive Marguerite DuBois. The daughter whose father read her bedtime stories until she was fifteen. The daughter with the good manners and she played the violin like she had been taught by a teacher. The daughter with the brother who was mentally ill and killed their parents and then himself. The daughter who could no longer afford to be called Marguerite DuBois.

Because there no longer was a girl named Marguerite DuBois, she died in a fire, her body burned beyond recognition while her parents were respectfully buried by the old farmer across the road who does not exist. I stood in front of the burning house, thinking about how I would go forward. Slight stains of gasoline on the handle of my violin case, the heavy bag on my shoulder weighed with everything that I owned, everything that I could safely say to anyone that I was never that pretty DuBois girl.

The stench of smoke up my nose, fingernails encrusted with grave dirt, eyes alight with the flames of her memories, her nostalgic thoughts drifted to when she was still naïve and well mannered. When her father used to read "The Jungle Book" to her. He always used to say that she was never such a troublesome child as Mowgli or a crazy uncle like Balu. No, instead he called her the panther Bagheera. The one who looked after everyone, the one who cared for the paranoid schizophrenic in the other room. She was kind and fair and everyone knew that she was in charge.

Bagheera. No longer was there Marguerite DuBois, no she's dead. And born from the flames of my memories and mishaps and the lies that I would always carry with me, born of fire and ash...Bagheera is my name.

~Γ[