Blue fire

[image eyeflame]1

She walked the hallways, same as everyone else, in a fixed pattern that had varied only slightly since she’d gotten her schedule what felt like a year ago. It wasn’t, of course, it had really been only a few short months. Time is supposed to speed up as you get older, but for her, it had more of a bell curve effect, a sort of oscillation that moved faster during the summer, withering her freedom away, and again in the middle of the year, when tedious hours dash away and are forgotten.
Sometimes, when she roused herself out of the walking slumber that seemed to be contagious of this place, she would start, and blink awake, and see; what she saw, as she stood, a rock in the river of flowing people, forming eddies where she blocked their path, was individuals:
This is what she saw, one day, as she opened her eyes and looked around:
She hears a noise, and turns around. Although there are conversations, arguments, secrets, envy, hate, romance, all this blends into a cacophony of noise and emotion that . What she heard was someone else who was awake. Perhaps this is what woke her from the slumber, she muses, as she sees. She sees two beaming faces come skipping round the bend in the circle.
Hand in hand, their hair flying with the speed, their leaps and bounds carrying them to the height of those around them. One girl is cajoling the other into trying to be happy, as the other is dragged into a laugh, thrown face-first into a smile, heaved bodily forward out of the shadows that clouded her mind and fueled the blue flame inside her head. Watching them, she sees how the black that one wears seems to become lighter as they approach the standing girl, even as the shroud of dark is pulled from the face of the brightly-clothed one and tossed aside. But as they grow closer, she could see the shadows in the dark one’s eyes.
Later, at another waking moment, she reflected that it was impossible to tell if the gloom inside those deep, richly browned eyes was absorbed from the other woman-child, or if they were caused by some other cold, blue flame of sadness that wouldn’t be extinguished without a fight. She knew such flames well: they robbed you of your energy, then dared you to put them out—which of course you couldn’t do, as you no longer had the strength nor the will to fight such a long and hard battle. To banish it, you needed someone else, but the lightless girl she had seen was the lighter’s someone else. The blue flame soared higher. On a whim, she asked what she had seen of the dim-clothed girl, recreated in her head, "Why?"
And in her mind, the inner replica responded:
"I have to be there for her. I don’t really have a choice. It’s not that I don’t want to help me, too, but I have to help her. When you care so much for someone, you cannot be truly happy unless they are. Luckily she cannot see the twin flames burning in my eyes. She sees only her own grief—and I’m glad of that. I don’t want to have her worried about me too. She has enough shadows in her eyes, without adding the one my cloud of sadness would create."
"You have no doubts on this, then? You have chosen this path, and you do not question it. I envy you, if this is true."
"There is not much to envy here. I know full well what I am doing, yet, if I but had the chance, I would gladly shepherd all others from it. These are not greener pastures I go to—they have been burnt to the ground. I hope that someday the ashes will fertilize the ground, and I will grow again, but I will be ravished by the blue flame, hungry inside me. Only ashes will be left. I may grow from the fertile ground the falling cinders create, but it is not likely. This is the path I take, though I would not recommend it."
"You hope to save her?"
"I do. I present myself before her, or rather beneath her, as I offer everything I have. This is what I give her—a place to stand. I tell her, in my own mind: Stand on my shoulders, so that you may breathe a little longer, as we drown in the sea. A salty aquatic vastness we swim in, as we try to keep afloat in the ocean of tears."
"So you shall ketch her, when she falls?"
"That is my hope."
"But who will ketch you, for her weight will doubtless overbalance your unsteady grip on reality. Who will rescue the savior? Who will save you?"
The murky being the girl who was awake had created in her mind was silent as it lurked in the shadowy depths of the girl who stood and watched. had no answer for that.2

The girl, amused by herself, turned back and let the flow of the river carry her to her destination. She liked playing with fire, and enjoyed kindling it in those who she saw. As the girls rounded the corner, unaware that someone had peeked into their minds, the one who could see gave the darker one a gift (though, with eyes blurred by the blue flame growing ever hotter, the one in black would never see it).3

"O shadowed girl! the shadow that is blacker than the rest, I call for you.” she called into the recesses of her mind. "I have a gift for you!" She knew that the gift would be carried to the real world through the bond she had created by seeing into the darker one’s mind.
"What is the gift?" the inner dark one asked, taking the heavy load.
It was firewood.4

996 words5