The Firebuilder
I’m standing at my campsite. My tent is behind me, small and bespeckled in a purple and green and dark blue night sky print. My first ever backpacking pack, nicknamed Twilight, sits nearby. I am safe here in this place I’ve found, this imagined haven in the woods that’s part memory and part metaphor. I have everything I need.
I built the fire myself. It took twenty years or so and I made a lot of mistakes along the way. I got lost gathering wood. I didn’t know how to light it. How to shape it. How to keep it burning and strong. But I got there.
It’s fueled by my intelligence, my drive, my vibrancy, my got-my-shit-togetherness, and by the work I’ve done on myself to heal and grow. Tending this fire is how I care for myself. It is how I love myself: useful and hot and bright.
All my life, ever since I can remember, I’ve loved to invite people to come sit by my fire. These people don’t have their own for various reasons and I say, “Come, sit. Stay.”
Stay.
Stay.
I don’t want these people to leave. I don’t want them to build their own fires. I want them at my fire.
Stay.
I offer sticks for them to light and go, to find their own way, to make their own fires, and when they don’t go I’m relieved.
Stay.
“Why!” I asked my therapist. “Why do I gather these people with no fires? Why do I keep doing this over and over again?”
It doesn’t always serve me. My exhusband stomped on my fire, poured water on it, trashed my whole campsite, and left.
I rebuilt it.
My boyfriend comes and goes, makes his way in and out. I don’t know where he is when he’s gone, but he’s never returned with ash on his shoulders, sparks still in his eyes. He wanders in the cold. He’s never built his own fire.
Friendships, too.
Stay.
“Is this like an ego thing? I want to be admired for my fire? I want people to need it?”
No, my therapist says.
She’s known me for ten years. She knows all kinds of things. I don’t think that’s it, she says. She waits for me to speak.
At first I don’t have words. I don’t know, can’t imagine what else. I wait for my body to tell me. What do I feel? The idea of someone I love leaving my fire to start their own, nearby? How does that feel?
Fear overtakes me. It feels like rejection. Like abandonment. I am terrified.
I’m afraid that when a firesharer builds their own fire, they’ll leave me.
I never cry in therapy, but this gets me.
The fear is so big. As big as the night sky where my gaze drifts as the fire sparks rise. As endless as the black, black sky. My fear is endless.
I let myself feel it and I sit and cry.
I notice the urge to lay on the floor which is what happens to me when I feel any overwhelming emotion. Often gratitude or relief drive me to the floor, face down. I am grateful for this new Knowing.
Later I go to my boyfriend who has been avoiding doing his own healing work for a long time, avoiding taking care of himself well. I tell him about the campsite and my firebuilding and my lifelong pattern and my fear. My endless fear.
I’m handing you a lighted stick, I say. You can take it to light your own fire. I need you to. You need you to. It’s time. I hope we can share a campsite, I say, knowing that as he leaves my fire I have to face that big fear: Will he still want me, once he has his own?
I look at my fire, so thoughtfully built.
It’s brighter than ever.
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