Ember and Flame

Here's where I was when writing this: sitting in the halfway house of a golf course, reading Sarah J. Maas on the clock between serving grotesquely rich country club members food and drinks within the minute they demanded them. I want to be a writer, not serve these people - or any people, for that matter, I thought over and over, until the thought finally sparked a fire that blazed in my soul so vigorously that I couldn't help but unleash it upon a Guest Check notepad. Below is the resulting flame.

I wasn't made for this gentle of an existence. For a life of submission and settling. But I was forced to conform to it, and so when I conformed, I conformed hard. Conformed too well.

The compliance that life demanded morphed into submission - a strange, ugly sort that pushed my head under the raging surface of orders given by men who are no more than I am. So now I flounder and thrash against the pitch of obedience, a pitch that I voluntarily live under for fear of breathing on my own.

Tolerance followed soon after compliance, which then also mutated itself into fear of what I should have merely overlooked for sanity's sake.

I shrunk and burned myself to embers. I became less than, because I forced it upon myself, thinking small and digestible would pass me along to a better standing. I bent myself around and under every order given, every discomfort of humanity. Thinking that restraint would result in my reign. Thinking that crumpling into a ball would result in standing tall.

So now my dragons heart simmers under a thick layer of ash and rubble, the remnants of what I once lost among the ruins of brazen fearlessness. Lost for so long.

And yet, the hope of a spark still lives, because my dream still lives. My unabashed, childlike ambition burns on under all of this debris - just a small surge of blazing red and orange. I'm learning how to feed the ember, how to fan it, fuel it. I'm resuscitating it, bringing the dragon back from the brink of pure destruction.

The dragon will soar. And this time, its wings will have the stamina, wisdom, and courage enough to make wind a mere luxury under the strength of their trajectory. When I was a child, I thought like a child, in all of childhood's physical and mental restraint. Now, in the early stages of this third decade of life, my thoughts do not know the bounds that my body does, and my mind runs with the possibility of writing myself into another body, another creature, another world. I will stand tall again, and rather than spitting upon those whose wealth of knowledge or money lays beneath mine, I will look kindly upon them. I will offer first a hand to stand back up from the familiar ball I once lay in, and then offer them wings of their own. Because I know what obedience does to a dragon - the choking that takes place under the demands of those who shouldn't be giving them.

It isn't easy for any of us dragons to recognize how temperate the fires have become in our throats. To recognize that it is time to fly again after slumbering in our caverns of golden comfort. That small, reduced ember can become too familiar, providing just enough warmth for restless solace, but not enough to ward off stagnancy. Repetition can add to the false sense of comfort, disguising itself as a routine too dear to break.

But again I say, the hope of a spark still lives. Words are my steel and the page is my flint, and I strike hard with every syllable, sparks flying at the ember in wild disarray until one hits its mark, and I blow and fan at it with all my might. Hope given blazing life. And I swallow the resulting flame, my breathe surging back to its former splendor, until finally - finally - I unleash my flame upon the world.