DAY 11 - APRIL 28TH, 2009

2009-04-28T04:30:09Z

the fire that does not burn

The small measure-keeper gave off a tiny glow that resembled the outline of a coke bottle. The light settled itself upon the surface which glowed a metallic silver that stretched across its width and back again like a mother’s protective embrace. In fact, the very body itself was shaped like the burgeoning belly of a pregnant woman, a round womb stretched and heaving with child that began it’s life the moment the other poured in sweetly and softly from the coldness of the underground. It did not matter that it was a another woman’s child. It did not matter that the other woman was cold and cosmic and warm and ugly and beautiful and all of the good and all of the bad and all of everything all at once – the child had come into her care, and her love for the child was her life and will become her death.

Inside that belly, the mother’s child began its growth. From its cold beginnings, it eventually became accustomed to the mother’s stomach, and with it, accustomed to the warmth that was the source of the mother’s life. Growing and growing, the warmth spread, and its child bubbled and grew, that life-sucking child, that life-sustaining child, who both killed the mother and sustained the mother, and took the love of the mother and transformed that into life.

And as the child grew, it became far too large for the mother and its impatience for the world flowed outward in a stream of life and warmth until it came into contact with the sky. And with that contact, its impatience transformed into something fleeting and wistful, which gently wafted up towards the clouds and integrated itself slowly into the air.

Drawn in by its fleeting beauty, we watched as it wafted and pranced through the air in an ethereal dance, a dance that seemed so much of the embodiment of life. For not only was the dance the union of a mother and her child, but also of the life and joy they shared as they reveled in each other’s embrace. Because of that, we become filled with lust and want and an insatiable thirst for what we did not, could not have, and in one smooth motion, we knocked the glowing mother from her pedestal of life, and sent her clattering across the smooth marble.

Her child spilled forth onto the marble, and with a sickening sound, traveled across the surface in a combination of shock and anguish, and its emotions transformed into a jumble of the same fleeting beauty that we had seen earlier - only, this time, it’s a dance of slowly fading life, and far too jumbled and confused and disappeared far too soon for us to glean any sort of enjoyment from. The few brave ones that attempt to near the child, to harvest it and to remove it from its protective embrace around the cold body of its mother would be burnt, for the child has become angry, and even as a child, the child has fangs.

And that anger courses through the child like the same way its mother nurtured it with its love, growing and growing and blazing with its anguish. However, it’s a fire which does not burn, does not consume, but instead, it’s a fire that extinguishes the desire of others, and because of it, we lose all desire of destruction and pain and anguish and wait until the fire itself has become nothing, transformed into sorrow and became a part of the same impatience, and shock and anguish that it had been before.

Eventually, the child subsided, slowly, carefully. It had matured, and it came to realize, that the anger it felt coursing throughout its body should not be wasted into ephemeral beauty, succeeding the cold, cold body of its mother. Sorrowfully, it began to understand, that the fire was a gift from its mother, a transformation of her love for it into a coursing, pumping form that would be its gift to another. And because of that, the child becomes an adult, and we rejoice as it becomes a part of us, sustaining us with the same love that its mother had sustained it.

For the fire that does not burn would warm the children of others and generations to come.

Bet you'll never guess. 8D

Gloria Patria

DAY 11 - APRIL 28TH, 2009