The Campfire

The world is vast. So is time. But, let’s say that if by some coincidence you had been looking down on one particular house, in one particular city, in one particular country at one specific moment in time, this is what you would have seen:

A fire—burning down to embers.

A night sky—so clear as to be reflected back in the eyes of any dreamer who lifts their gaze to the stars beyond.

Three discarded sticks—the gummy residue left behind by marshmallows, long since consumed, hardening with every passing second.

And finally…

A family—nothing more than silhouettes; two crouching, one reclining, all illuminated by the warm, dim light of the campfire. 

The girl was closest. So close that she could practically see the hazy heat as it rolled off the fire and over her in waves. It made her skin prickle and she knew that it would be red in the morning. 

Despite this though, she could not look away. Instead, she leaned closer, watching, mesmerized as the fire rippled below the surface of the embers. It almost looked, she thought, as though the fire itself was breathing. 

“How can fire look so alive when it isn’t?”

The mother poses a question: “What makes you say it isn’t alive?”

“Well, I mean, in the biological sense…”

The girl trailed off, letting the quiet trilling of crickets and distant humming of a plane creep in to fill the silence. What she didn’t say, but oh, how she thought it, is that fire may not be alive according to the checklist of characteristics that scientists have imposed onto the world (one of the many lists constructed by humanity in an attempt to categorize everything into boxes), but the fire is alive in every other aspect of the word. After all, how could something unalive bring life to all the moments its light touches? How could a fire leap and dance and spin and twirl and burn and die, if it is not, in fact, alive?

Must you not first be alive before you have the capacity to die?

Fire is not only alive, but it makes us alive. 

But the girl did not say these things. Instead she closed her eyes, relishing the feeling of warmth while listening to her parent’s quiet breathing mixed with the muffled pop and crackle of the fire’s singing, embracing the smoke that rose to wrap around her—the arm of an old friend you just realized how much you’d missed. 

Finally, after a long time (or maybe a short time, because what is time but a way to contain moments) the girl let out a sigh that echoed around the campfire:

“I guess I should go finish my school work.”

“And I should probably finish cleaning out the pantry,” the mother whispered.

“I suppose the dishes need to be washed,” the father murmured.

And yet, despite these “shoulds, probablies, and supposes,” not one of the three moved from that fire. Each one sat, waiting for the others to move, but none of them did. None of them wanted to be the first to signal that this wonderful moment had come to an end.

Silence once again wrapped around their shoulders, a welcoming blanket. No more words were needed because the silence said everything that needed to be said in that moment (because what are moments but memories yet to be made).

No. All that needed to be done was to exist beside each other while the fire breathed—lived—between them.

In the morning, all would wake up with a smile, because just as the smoke had woven its way into the threads of their clothes, so had this movement become entwined into the very fabric of their souls.