I've always had a complicated relationship with fire.
My family and I used to eat dinner in our backyard on the spring nights that hinted at an oncoming summer. After the sun had set, we would toast marshmallows under country skies dusted in stars. My mother carefully rotated them to a perfect golden brown, while I, like my father, shoved them carelessly into the flames before running to dance on the freshly watered grass. Pulling my chair close to the firepit, I’d hold my feet to the flames, watching as the steam rose from my socks. My parents would tell me to be careful, but if I stayed still and quiet enough, people stopped watching. Even then, I understood that you could disappear without ever moving a muscle. It was only when I was spinning on my tiptoes, catching the firelight like some kind of dizzy disco ball, that people paid attention.
Fire and I have always played together, though we aren't really friends.
At the age of six my teacher asked me to talk to my class about my experience in a house fire. She had seen me as the shy, responsible student who would never do something so reckless as arson, even by mistake. Once she had even given me a glass figure, a mermaid, telling the class that I was the sort of person who could be trusted. I broke it after a month. Still, I wanted to prove her right, so I mumbled something about "stop, drop, and roll," rather than admit what had really happened. The truth was that I had been heating up a wheat bag for my younger brother when I hit an extra zero that turned two minutes into twenty. I don’t even know if I’d realised it was my fault as I woke in my dad’s arms. Sat between my brothers on the bricks in the backyard, we watched as the smoke from the microwave, not even a week old, filled the house. In the end I didn’t even care. I was just excited to stay in a fancy hotel.
A decade later I was working in that same hotel when my coworker told me she’d had a dream. In it, our industrial toaster had caught fire, which wasn't particularly surprising given the groans it made as it carried bread through multiple levels, eventually revealing a sad piece of marginally warmer bread. She told me that in this dream I held the toaster as it burned, screaming as the flames licked my arms. She begged me to put it down, but I just kept holding on, loyal to a suffering that saved no one.
She didn't know this, but as a child I liked grilled cheese, and in making it, once put a plate in the grill rendering the porcelain unbearably hot. Convinced that the cold water running over it wasn’t helping, I held it, crying as I drew the heat into my blistering palms. Sometimes I wonder what it says about me that I will hold on to something as it burns. What she saw in me that gave it away.
I'm older now, though some days I'm not sure I’m wiser. The last time I went to the doctor we were chatting about the sound of rain, her roof chiming as if being struck by tiny silver pellets. I’d excitedly told her about how I hoped the sky would clear for a solar eclipse happening that afternoon, and she immediately told me not to look at it. She followed with her own story of a solar eclipse watched carefully through a welding mask, but the faint mistrust remained, evident in her reminder as we parted. Don’t look at the sun.
Naturally I went home and did it anyway, as we both knew I would. Gambling on polarised sunnies and an overcast sky, I sat and stared at the big ball of fire, waiting for an eclipse that never came. Somewhere I’d convinced myself that if the harm was less overt it didn’t count. That I could be the girl who kept an eye out for magic no matter the risk, rather than merely the girl who told a medical professional her plan to blind herself.
Despite this, people always saw me as water. My parents called me their water baby: half mermaid and impossible to drag out of the sea. I was labelled as calm and let that word stand in for years. The way still water is mistaken for depth. For peace. No one stopped to consider that the calm waters are where you find the rip. At the age of nine I almost drowned attempting to swim under a waterfall, so certain there would be a paradise waiting for me on the other side. That wasn’t how people saw me though, so I tried to be the person they believed me to be. If I looked like water and acted like water, maybe I simply was. I could be the thing that put fires out, rather than the thing that started them.
Homesick in Dublin, I sat on a WhatsApp call that closed 17,191 kilometres of distance. It was 4am in Melbourne, and he had stayed up listening to me read various lines I had found memorable, including one from José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal.
“I killed a plant once because I gave it too much water. Lord, I worry that love is violence.”
We had spoken previously about how I’d accidentally drowned surfaced worms in my effort to save them from the summer sun. How I’d probably suffocated him in many ways too. He didn’t speak for a while, but his breath sounded different to how it did in his sleep, so I waited. He surprised me when he said, "No. You're the water. If anything, you kill things when you retreat."
He was wrong. They all were.
I am not water. I've spent my whole life trying to convince myself I'm water, despite the fact that I’ll get too close on purpose. I’ll hold flames that burn flesh. Stare into lights that blind perfectly good eyes. A phoenix is supposed to burn and come back new, but I have only ever managed the burning part.
I am the fire.