And there I was… Sitting alone, on the floor, with my toy kitchen. I got the little pans, and the teeny-tiny supplies – to make “serious” imaginary food. I opened the fridge. Then the drawers. Finally, the top cabinets. There… surprise-surprise: a match box. A real one. The exact brand I saw everyday in the huge real-life kitchen, in the hands of Mrs. Manuelina, my grandmother’s cook and the only woman I’ve ever called Mrs. in my life, cause she felt like a queen to me… I picked it up. Opened the box. Inside, just ONE single match. Hum…
Was it real?… Couldn’t be, right? No way… But, if it was… Would I know what to do with it? I had seen Mrs Manuelina, the queen, managing matches all the time. It seemed easy enough. I could just do it. Make that “risk” gesture. Nothing would really come of it, for sure. This was, after all, a toy. It was all imaginary. Nothing to fear, at all. I looked around. Not a single soul anywhere to be seen… I’m all by my self, I thought. Just me, at the powerful heights of my six-year-old self. In one move, I risked it. And…
Oh my God! That thing was real! I screamed. And tossed it over, on the floor, away from me, terrified. Nothing of consequence happened. The lighten match went out on it’s on. I didn’t get burned or anything. But I was seriously frightened by the surprise and the power of IT. IT!!! And a history of attraction-repulsion began. Above all, fear. FEAR in capital letters. That one you know is bigger than reason… I couldn’t do it anymore. I would never, ever, again come anywhere near… IT. I was not about to get burnt. No bloody way. Not ever.
As time went by, “we” had other encounters… And the fear grew at every turn of a corner. I would refuse to get anywhere near it. My heart would start racing if someone would so much as lit a cigarette many steps away from me. Independent as I became with house chores at a very early age, I would never make myself a grilled cheese if there was no one else around to do the IT part for me. I would cry and beg to avoid touching matches… When I was ten, my mom decided it was time to do something about it.
“This ends right now”, she said, standing in front of me, in the kitchen, with a match box in hands. “Take it. Do it. I’m right here”. Oh my God, the drama of it. I was shaking like a bamboo stick in the eye of a storm. Shaking and sweating. I could hardly breathe. My sister came in, so did my step father… Gosh, the dogs even came to watch the spectacle of a lifetime! And it was ,definitely, a “show”. A loooong one. But, eventually, I did it. I lit a bloody match. Watched it “on”, for a second. Blew it out, safely. First time was really intense. So, so scary. I felt I was about to have a heart attack. Second time, almost just as bad. Third time… Forth… Fifth… Tenth… Twentieth… Hell, I did the whole damn box! I took it to the living room and did it while watching my favorite tv show. The next day, when my mom came into the house, she found me with a huge pile of used up matches in front of me, in the astray. She shook her head and laughed:
“Nice, now I’ve created a pyromaniac”…
It was not so, obviously. I mean… There was a certain pleasure in the act… The power, the beauty of it… But, most of all, it was about the thrill of conquering a deep, overwhelming fear I had been carrying with me for so long. I had successfully overcome a big obstacle in my life. It was a “big win”. Yet… I had never really understood that fear until now…
Fears don’t come out of nowhere. Nor do they make sense in the way we usually think they do. Sometimes big, horrible events happen to us and we develop no significant fear over them. I mean, how many times I fell down the stairs, or hit my head playing ball, or cut myself with a knife? And yet… I never feared stairs, or balls or sharp objects.
On the other hand, years later, I would develop a close-to-phobia-fear of lions (mind you, I never came anywhere near to the king of the jungle… cause… right?… Who has? We’re not in ancient Rome, after all) that included repetitive nightmares, for years. It got so bad, at one point I couldn’t stay very long in a room if there was a picture of a lion nearby… And since we’re talking animals, don’t even get me started on horses…
But, back to the original fear of my life… That thing… IT. But when and where did it start, anyways? For many years, I thought it did at that moment, with the toy kitchen. It wasn’t the case… As any other fear, that one really began with… myself. I never really feared the thing itself. I feared what it MEANS.
Fire is the first and ultimate power of life. It is also the major force of destruction. It’s beautiful and mesmerising. Dangerous and deadly. It’s golden and bright, it turns things into dark ashes. It makes us warm and comfortable. It burns and kills us. It is a symbol of genius, victory, passion. It is the image of terror, punishment, death. The thing that can never be just one or the other. It is all of it and that’s the only way you may… you MUST take it, embrace it, be MADE by it.
As I begin this new year, of 2022, and I contemplate the road ahead of me, the woman I’ve become; I look back, for a moment, at that girl, who kind of knew that match was real and risked it anyway… And then there was… There is… IT. FIRE.