Campfire

            There is a requisite boredom needed before throwing a paper plate in a campfire is entertainment. The fire is coals, just pieces of carbonized wood that glow like liquid steel and flame like meat-ready charcoal. The plates sit on the coals, as though fireproof. For these few seconds, they don’t brown, or flame, or curl.

            When they catch fire, it begins at an edge. When cardboard burns, it burns center-out. The middle, or some central spot, browns. A brown circle, growing like a sphere passing through a two-dimensional world, spreads like bad language across the cardboard

            Plates burn out-in. Flames, orange, and bright as an un-thought idea, move around the edges like an encircling army. The burned parts curl upon themselves like the legs of a dried spider. Flame grows over each plate like weeds, seem to hover over it, and the plate finally burns.

            The flames are rude, destructive, not just to the plate but to the coals. The coals glow like the cheeks of a well spent lover or the nose of a cold drunkard. The flames reach skyward, not content with the slow, low burn of the coals.

            Like a person whose dreams are too high, aims too unrealistic – impossible – the flames reach to light the whole night, set the very sky, its darkness, alight with the brilliant glow of actualization. Like a person whose dreams are too high, the flames also tire, lose strength, and fade.

            The plate remains, though, as a shrunken, circular ash totem to the dreams it fed. The ashes glow like the coals, but ash is not the stuff of coals and it, too, fades. The glow of the plates’ ashes fades from the inside out, like a city’s lights going off, a line of darkness spreads outward as the flames’ last vestiges use what energy remains. When its ashes have faded, the circle of paper broken to shreds and carried away in the breeze, no trace of the once-plate remains. Like a person who dreams too grandly, the ashes of the plate’s life, too, try for the sky and fail.

            Coals are the still-burning, glowing parts. Ash is the wholly burned remnants – the proof that once there was a fire, that once existed the flame which consumed it. The line of dying paper coals is brighter than the wood coals below it. Behind the line, ash ripples in the fire-wind. It tears from the rest of the once-plate and is thrown upward, a final chance to land and spread the flames that consumed it. The death-line is bright as the fire consuming, in final glory, the energy which fed it. Energy can be used only once.

            Fire falls into a confusing scientific class. Is it energy or matter? It seems an odd, simple question. It must be energy for it is heat, causes motion via thermal currents, and, most importantly, creates light. Yet it is the result of hot gasses and smoke which were once wood. And matter, according to physics, has always been and must always be matter. Energy, to, has always been energy. The nature of fire, the stuff of it, is complex and lacks easy classification and identity.  People, too, are complex and lack easy classification and identity.

            A campfire is like a lifetime in short. There is a stack of wood and the potential for anything. The flames can be tough to start, like adulthood, and a good bed of coals a long time in coming, like maturity, but once they are in place, and the potential power of the wood depleted to ashes, the campfire accepts its slow burn, clinging to a dim mimicry of its youth.

            But the coals, like mature adulthood, are when the fire is at its best. The coals last longer than the fuel which made them, carry the flames’ legacy beyond the ability of that which made them.

            Flames, like an evil religion, consume. Like people, too, they exist to use, destroy, and leave indelible marks on that which they touched. Fire teaches the danger of folly. Fire also teaches the success. Though most fires burn and fade, like most people, all cast off ashes. Like the ashes cast off by people – the acts and thoughts of people – most land near the source and burn out. But some fires, rare fires, throw their ashes high. Some rare people, too, throw their ashes high, and when they land they set the world to blaze.

            To compare an individual to a flame is not an insult, but a compliment. It does not say: You are dangerous and unpredictable. It says: You reach higher than you have been given cause to and you may be that rare person who sets the world alight.