Fertile Ashes
“I wonder if the bursting of oneself into flames hurts just as much as being burned by someone else’s fire”
Fiction by Anonymous
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Cinnamon I
Since she announced her pregnancy in December, I have asked my older sister to name her second and upcoming child Phoenix. I have asked her this more than once though each time she refuses. Over the phone, she asks “Where’d you come up with that name anyway?”
Frankincense I
In college, I remember believing that a bird represented love. I was young and willing, back then, to fall in love. My willingness came from a consequential belief that I too, like a bird, had wings. Perhaps, maybe I even believed that love is what gave me the wings. To be honest, I can’t remember exactly what I believed, but what I do remember is that every day I wore a necklace: a long gold chain with a singular bird charm at the end of it. The bird sat directly over my breastbone, perfectly positioned like armor over my heart. I’m not sure where I bought the necklace. Likewise, I’m not sure where the necklace went or flew off to. It left me sometime in college. Perhaps, back then, I thought that love was a bird because it always flew home. Even without a map. It simply felt where home was and traveled toward it, soaring on and against all elements to get there.
Frankincense II
These days, I don’t often think of love as a bird. Truthfully, I haven’t thought of it this way in years. I had even forgotten that I once believed these things until today.
Ginger I
This morning, over hot water and honey, an old friend tells me on the phone that fear is the weakest of all the emotions. Truth, he goes on to say, esla gran cosa.
Cinnamon II
In high school, my sister didn’t tell me about Rachel Kavanaugh. She never told me that Rachel’s favorite snacks were, and would always be, Oreos or that if you asked Rachel to make a baby dinosaur sound, she would perform a tiny squeal that could make anyone in the room laugh, even those put off by her buzzed haircut. My sister didn’t tell me about Rachel Kavanaugh, and so she never told me when they started dating or that: “Dear Rachel, I’m falling in love with you.” I discovered these things during my sister’s junior year from reading her Facebook messages like a little sister always does. She was in the shower when I approached her. “I know about Rachel.” The water turned off abruptly and the shower door tore open. My sister’s pale skin reddened with anger and fear. Or maybe just from the hot water. “How fucking dare you?” She lunged toward me and I ran to my bedroom. After that day, my sister never invited me to her high school parties, never sat me down and told me boys didn’t care if you shaved or not, never came into my room and watched tv with me until we both fell asleep next to one another. By the end of her senior year, my sister and Rachel Kavanaugh had broken up. I’m not sure who ended things with whom.
Ginger II
To my old friend over the phone, “Doesn’t our fear come from our past tragedies?”
“And what,” he asks, “is the truest tragedy?”
When I don’t answer, he asks me who he is. I say, “It’s not a him.”
Myrrh I
Everyday before sitting at my desk to write, I light a stick of palo santo. Some mornings I light the palo santo and, for a long time, I sit there and watch the flames engulf it. The fire circling, twisting, rising. The orange flame, for the briefest of moments, becoming still and revealing the purest red in its center. Sometimes, I feel the urge to touch the blazing stick to the furniture, to the bookshelf, to the walls, to the bed frame. I imagine watching the room combust, witnessing the fire grow. To not have to contain it. To not have to be afraid of what it is, what it can do and what it will do to me. This morning is no exception. The fire is burning. I can smell it in the air.
Myrrh II
Before this week, if someone asked me what (if not a bird) was love to me, I would have said fire.
Cinnamon III
When my sister was pregnant with her first child, I was left by the man whom I envisioned a comfortable future with. His reason for leaving me: “There’s something missing for you, and you won’t admit it.” Upon our ending, I fell into a dark depression and flew to my family’s home in Massachusetts. There, I spent my days crying and wishing to be engulfed in the flames of life. I wished for them to burn me into embers, to show me, please show me, what I was apparently missing. Falling in love and falling into depression felt similar: the consuming nature of such an act. Because of my sadness, my sister invited me over to her house every night. There, we’d sit on her couch. I would lay my head on her growing belly and listen to the stirrings of my nephew inside of her. One day, when her husband was watching their alma mater’s basketball game in the basement, she took her at-home ultrasound device and pressed the wand against her stomach. She searched patiently until she found the soundwaves emanating from her womb. Together, we listened to my nephew’s heartbeat, and she smiled at me in a way that she hadn’t in years, since back before I found out about Rachel.
Cinnamon and Myrrh I
Today, when I think of fire, I think of the terror in my sister’s face when I told her that I knew her secret; of the anger she carried for me until the day she was carrying her first child, perhaps until the day we sat on the couch and, together, listened to his heartbeat.
Cinnamon IV
When my first nephew was born, my sister named him after my hometown. At the hospital, with my newborn nephew in my arms, I felt love again: love untainted, love unburned. I touched my head to his little chest and listened. A month after he was born, my nephew gave me wings, and I finally had the courage to fly south again. When I arrived at my New York City apartment, I walked through the rooms, once shared and now solely mine, and took note of the missing elements: the toaster oven, the floor length mirror, the art in the living room, the blue toothbrush in the medicine cabinet. I wondered then, amongst the missing, if my sister had sent Rachel Kavanaugh a birth announcement. Then I wondered if my sister still thought about Rachel as much as I did.
Ginger III
An hour ago, when my friend asked what I believed the truest tragedy was, I wish I had said: the truest tragedy is our inability to admit what we’re feeling, the way we hide even from ourselves. Perhaps, without even saying it, this is what I said.
Cinnamon V
To this day, my sister has never admitted to me that her first love was a woman. Until this day, I have never admitted to myself that perhaps my ex-boyfriend was right.
Cassia I
Yesterday, three days after my nephew’s first birthday, I met her in the park. Her skin was brown and tattooed. Her hair, bleached blonde. Her eyes, amber and piercing. An intensity I hadn’t known from her pictures. The spring sun was shining on us, but still I was shivering. An hour in, she turned and straddled the bench we were sitting on. Her body faced mine. She asked me if I’ve ever told someone I was falling in love with them first. I said, “I haven’t. The guys always said it first. And the longest a guy has waited was four weeks.”
We both laughed. “You can’t know someone in four weeks! Nevermind love them!”
I agreed with her. Truly, at that moment, I agreed. I said, “Truth is, I don’t know if I’ve ever actually loved a man.”
“How about a woman?”
“I’m not—” I stopped myself. My shivers suddenly turning into heat. The heat rising in my body into my cheeks. When I couldn’t finish the words, she looked at me, and I looked at her, and we stayed there staring at one another for just a moment too long; a second too poignant for either of us to conceal. In my chest, where that golden bird used to hang like armor, I felt that missing something, that thing I once felt, but couldn't admit to, rise and give birth to itself.
Cassia II
That night after we left one another, we spent four hours on Facetime, and I watched her smile under the purple lights of her bedroom.
Myrrh, Cinnamon & Cassia I
Today, I awaken, and she is the first thing I think of. To keep from texting her, I wash my face and sit down at my desk. Though I cannot, my writing this morning says it all. My hands, here on the keyboard, have hesitated to give her a name, yet still she has appeared between the disjointed metaphors. My mind cannot think of anything to write of except of love, and as I write of love, I think of her. To the scent of burning wood and the sunrise of Manhattan, I realize that I’m doing what I’ve never done so soon. I’m doing, perhaps, what I have never done at all. Still, I can’t tell her how I feel. How can I after all we said yesterday? How can I when the only thing I can picture this morning is my teenage sister’s face when I told her I knew her secret?
Ginger IV
Another tragedy, in the midst of many tragedies, is finding yourself falling in love with someone while speaking of the impossibility of such a thing. Another tragedy is letting someone go because you’re scared of how they make you feel.
Cinnamon VI
One afternoon before my first nephew was ever conceived, I asked my sister over lunch if she identified as bisexual. She seemed shocked and angered at the question. As if I was supposed to forget what happened in high school. As if, perhaps, she had chosen to forget and I had the audacity to remind her.
“I’m happily married.”
“I know but—”
“Trevor came out of nowhere. I saw him there on the basketball court and I knew. I loved him in an instant and nothing else from the past mattered.” When she said this, I couldn’t help but not believe her. Today, I wonder if I was wrong not to.
Myrrh III
Every day I light the palo santo at my desk and I sit there watching the elements, like a person, dance around the wood. For a moment, I get lost among them. I would like for this moment to last forever. But, eventually, I blow the fire out. Most likely I blow it out before it's necessary. I’m cautious. I’ve been burned before and I, too, have burned others. Once or twice even to the bone; the bare structure of their being. I remember their skin aflame. Their organs, their heart, in ashes. The ashes blowing away in the wind like a bird, but with no wings. Today, I wonder where my ashes settled. I wonder if they somehow silently found their way back to me. I never gave my heart a map, but maybe, like a bird, like my first nephew’s name, it could just feel its way back home.
Frankincense & Myrrh I
Most people know that a phoenix dies by bursting into flames and finds new life by rising from its pyre, but what I learn today at my desk is that when a phoenix rises from its ashes, it returns to itself only to live another cycle of life, another five hundred years. It is said that only one phoenix exists on earth at a time. And so it is said that only once in five hundred years a fire, unlike any other, can be witnessed. I wonder what it looks like when the phoenix sets fire to itself. When its desire for rebirth finally overcomes its fear of death. Fear: the weakest emotion. The cause of the truest tragedy, like not being able to say what I really feel. You’re a woman, I just met you, and I think I could, like none of the others, love you. I wonder if the bursting of oneself into flames hurts just as much as being burned by someone else’s fire.
Pyre I
Today, if someone asked me what (if not a bird, if not fire) is love to me, I would most likely say surrender.
Pyre II
Before the phoenix surrenders itself to its own fire, it creates a nest which it will burn itself atop of. It collects items to make this death bed which will then become its womb. It dresses the nest with spices like myrrh, cinnamon, cassia, ginger, and frankincense. Once the nest is made, the phoenix bursts into flames. When its bone and marrow are completely burned, only ash remains. Legend says, from the ash, a worm grows and, from that worm, another phoenix “miraculously” rises. There is no prescribed time before one rises again. There is no warning sign or incubation date. Perhaps, the process of rebirth is ignited in the simplest of moments: the adjusting of a dating app setting, the vision of a particular woman’s smile, a singular swipe right, and the courage to type “hey.” Or perhaps, it begins with a boy on a college basketball court, the curve of his hands around a ball, the way a young girl in the bleachers pictures those hands around her growing belly in the future, the man’s mouth whispering through her skin to their second miracle that has yet to be named. Perhaps, there is an art we must learn from the phoenix, that I must learn from my sister. The art to fearlessly choose for ourselves. To choose when we finally let go of the past and allow ourselves to be reborn from the fertile ashes of who we once were.
Ashes I
To the scent of burning wood, I reach over and grab my phone. I type, I can’t stop thinking about that moment yesterday.
I see three dots appear on the screen. And then, I can’t either. Maybe four weeks isn’t that long.
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Header image courtesy of Raman Bhardwaj. To view his Artist Feature, go here.
The author of this work prefers to remain anonymous.
