Fires OR Why July, 2016 was the month I decided to move to Ohio.

With the millstone of a particularly disheartening election season hanging about my neck, and a thousand other daily, existential misgivings proper to the middle twenties buzzing constantly, fly-like about my head, I was not at all surprised to wake up to a blood red sun. It rose without triumph in a black sky, and delivered listless streams ofrusted light to the city of Los Angeles, as if the day were neither privilege nor promise, but a chore, done on time, dutifully, but without zeal. Through a ghostly prism of falling ash, cascading like a silent rain and covering the city in a fine layer of corpse grey soot, through the city-smog, the morning traffic, children, mothers, political debates, though all this dusty chaos, morning arrived, as it always does, like a good habit. “So,” I thought to myself, “it’s the apocalypse. Fair enough.” In truth, the weather irregularity was the product of a fire, which has at this point consumed tens of thousands of acres of forest land, destroyed 20 or so structures, threatened the property of 20,000 residents, and most likely killed at least one singular and irreplaceable mortal soul. It remains un-contained. Human beings, probably since the dawn of time, are fascinated by events like these. We are captivated by natural disasters, by extremity without passion: the ancient, faceless killers from on high. They defy the mind. They resist our desire to catalog, to know, to converse. And yet, inhuman as they clearly are, do they not entice from us our most subtle and imaginative anthropomorphic meddling? Are we not tempted, and perhaps for good reasons, to give features to floods and fires, and to feel the tragedy they induce as wrath rather than randomness? Surviving calamity always demands of us that we imagine the axe of heaven is directed, in one form or another, by some species of justice, albeit a primordial ancestor of our human ethics and far older than what we might recognize as a code of law.

How do we make sense of the inadvertent cruelty of nature? Nature, unruly, inconstant, fickle, is for man an all consuming Rorschach inkblot; she speaks so clearly precisely because of the thoughtless conditions of her inception. I fell and I slipped into being and the world is an inkblot and I’m on the universe’s couch, getting my head shrunk. Only, that’s not how it feels a lot of the time. The experience of living is not one of constant surprise, directionless twitching, particularly when the sun is red and California is burning to the ground and Trump’s voice won’t get out of my head. It’s one a hell of a pill to swallow, with all that going on, to concede that this whole thing is a giant inkblot and that the sense I’m making out the world and all its horrors is just that, sense made by me. What, after all, did I see in the inkblot of my mini apocalypse? What phantasms of light and shadow were born when the fluid universe poured itself into that vessel which offers form to content, my crystal mind, goddess of judgment, skeleton of sense? In that unhappy sky, that faceless nature, what else could I find, but gloomy tidings of a world gone to pot and terrible omens of a future that is headed flatly nowhere? An empty glass. Decidedly empty. Coated, in fact, with ash.

But I resist these conclusions. I resent them. I am an optimist, aren’t I? Or, if I’m not, then at least shouldn’t I be? What obligations, heavy and unshakable, have seated themselves parasite-like in the depths of my soul? There are, of course, the ever culpable early-childhood experiences that, for all people, are woven into the tapestry of their reflexes. At six, I remember how my feet, still all rubbery and plump, firmly planted in the grimy matt of our carpet, held the weight of my little body. I watched her, my mother, light the candles, celebrate the moon, enjoy, engage, entertain. Our poverty was star studded, significant, properly and deliberately hopeful. My mother does not berate the ear and corner the heart with words about the necessity of optimism is this world, (so sad, so full of men in need! Orphans! Widows! Alas! Alack!); she would cringe at the half-smile sophistry of positive thinkers and all other such traveling witch-doctors of our time. Her smile is common, and so it does not give lectures. Too many words ruin a thing like that.

So in the spring, the young birds stretch out their unremarkable wings and attempt to fly. And so too I, at twenty-five, find myself constantly considering the origins of the unspoken optimism of my mother. I know it from her stories. It was born from black and white television, from factories, from midwestern common sense and common decency, from cornfields and blades of grass and tree forts, cheap gin martinis in plastic cups, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, jazz, overalls. How does one recreate, emulate, the conditions for such a wordless upturn of the heart? The broth of her story has sat and stewed for decades, while mine is hardly more than water and bones.

But then again, I wonder, perhaps their upright spine, their stubborn pulse, the fortitude of their spirit, (my family, that is), is more march than mantra. Perhaps there is no secret in hiding, that you might find and pluck and sew unto to yourself, like a severed branch, to blend up into your being the natural variety latent in nature. “Make me new!” my heart calls out to the universe, “Plant me in some other, softer soil! Warmed and nourished by all that is dank and dark and gone I would, in such an Eden, grow! I would become the hero, which the poetry of my soul desperately longs to portend!”

All these words and more words and even some things that are not yet words, (but feel very much like they are on the cusp of becoming words), ran through my head, beneath the blood-red sun and held under by a sea of ash and angst. I missed the chance to have an early start on the day, missed the fast moving train of dawn. Noon came, it felt later. I sat and sat, wasting whatever potential might have hidden itself in the creases of that the auburn afternoon, and like a poorly written tragedy, I spoke some half hearted soliloquy to myself in faded plaid pajamas. I was not even ranting aloud. My coffee got cold.

And so the Gods appeared. They were predictably subtle in their interference. It was as if a little raincloud, like the kind you see in children’s cartoons, which gather deliberately over those malcontented talking animals, rolled out slowly on the horizon of my mind. We do not just imbue with intention the tempests that ravage our coasts, but also the storms which take place in us. My storm took the shape of a gentle rain, like the steady clop of army trained horses. They marched within me, steady drops unwittingly filling that glass which I had doomed to a dusty oblivion on a lonely shelf. She was quiet, but insistent, this cloud which made her way to center stage. Without apology, without affectation or urgency, drop after patient drop, she repeated for my benefit:

“Get up.”

And so I did.