‘Burning Bright’

It has been a long time since I wrote anything here at all – the last was about a loss of faith. I have yet to rediscover that faith, what was lost can never truly be found again in the same condition. I keep finding out more and more, and the old faith dies little by little. Of course, it was dead for a long time, I just had not learned that yet.

Almost every knows of the Phoenix – the bird of fire that builds its nest to die, consumed by its own flame to be reborn from the ashes. But what is the fire that consumes it, burning the old life for the new?

There is also a tale, a small one that not many seem to know – that when the Phoenix burns, it leaves two eggs, one the color of flames from which it is reborn, and another as black as the deepest midnight. When the fire bursts and the Phoenix rises from death, it rises from the egg of fire, leaving behind the other . . . but the tales never tell what is in that egg, what is born from it. I think I might know . . .

Memories of the past, all the old pain, the hurt, the sins – all the darkness of the previous life, left behind and locked away. Not forgotten, just abandoned.

I want to burn, set fire to this life and burn away all the anger and the hurt and the memories. I want to strip away layer by layer the person that I stopped being a long time ago – burn the mask and the old skin. I want to be reborn from the ashes and leave behind the blackness, the darkness that others gave me.

I find it interesting that I say I want this, when I have already started it. They started it for me really by killing my faith. It’s been a slow burn. Once I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself, and that started the whole thing – because I had started to peel away the past, deciding what to leave behind.

I’ve had a new life for awhile now, been who I really am. I like this change.

But I look back too often at the nest, the flames from which this new life was born. I look back and see the ebony egg, and some times I think I see a crack, the darkness threatening to escape and poison this new life.

But it is a slow burn, and the flame does not go out, and I can feel it always ready to consume everything. And with that knowledge, I smile – and the flames dance in my eyes.