Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash
Matthew Chu
The walls of my hallway were lined on both sides with candles of all colors, of all sizes. Each miniature flame flickered with an unpredictable yet graceful pattern, and the candles together produced a unified, rhythmical flicker of light against the corridor walls. As I wandered down my hall of candles, I opened a door off to the side into another passage. I hadn’t looked in there for many years, but it was once again lit by a blazing wildfire. Like a fiery storm, it burned across the ground and bounced between the walls, inviting me to follow it into the unknown. I’ve seen wildfires like these before, but this one glowed with a shade of fire I hadn’t encountered before. What once burned with a playful and youthfully bright glow now burned with a warmer passion, with an irresistible guiding light, pointing down yet another passageway. A passageway towards you.
Never trust a wildfire to be your lighthouse. They call it wild for a reason…
…but I followed it anyways.
Following the wildfire down the passageway, I watched as the unconstrained firelight danced in every direction, painting ever-changing, incomprehensible contours across the walls. As we proceeded, the mystery of the untamed flames loosened my grip on the old me, and I watched as I became the misty smoke around myself. The smoke was steadily thickening as we came closer to you, and I stayed close to it to avoid getting lost in the haze. Once we reached you, however, the smoke somehow lifted, and the fire lit the unknown corridors ahead for the both of us.
The smoke wasn’t really gone, rather it was just above us, waiting for the laws of gravity to catch up…
Shoulder to shoulder, we slowly followed the incandescent flames of the wildfire as it took us down the corridor. We must’ve gotten a bit too close to the blaze though, because all of a sudden, you told me you felt too hot and ran back to where we had been earlier. I didn’t even get a chance to call out to you before you vanished into the falling smoke. Not knowing what to do, I treaded behind the wildfire as the smoke above descended down upon me and blanketed all of reality from my eyes; this time in thick, dark plumes instead of cotton wisps.
I saw you again later, along the wildfire’s route to who knows where, and we both had the silent conclusion that we would pretend nothing had happened. We joyfully continued following the wildfire through more corridors, albeit this time slightly keeping our distance. The smoke overhead couldn’t come near us as the wildfire before us burned a sunset orange, and even gravity looked away from the hovering smoke. Later, you gave me a candle as a gift, and the wildfire lent us a glowing ember to light it. At that moment, the flame was young and little, but it had a distinctive incandescence to it that I could only describe as being just right, as being perfect.
Oh, how beautiful it was. The rosy, tamed flicker of the flame. A wildfire absent the wild.
With each passing day, we started gravitating closer and closer to the ever-moving wildfire as it led us toward its unknown destination. Gliding down hallway after hallway, its golden light immersed everything in its wake, and thousands of glittery embers shimmered around our faces. As the fire turned down another unassuming hall, it suddenly lurched back towards us like a traitorous monster. A searing pain erupted across my cheek as if the flames had pierced me with a thousand daggers, and I heard someone scream from beside me. Perhaps it was you, or perhaps it was me from within the heavy smoke cascading down around us. I heard the ceilings of the corridor crashing down around me, and I searched desperately through the smoke for you. Our hands finally found each other, and we just barely held on as you pulled me away from the destroyed hall. It felt like centuries had passed until the smoke dissipated, and when it did, we both tentatively peeked into the hallway that almost ended it all.
Or perhaps…it did end it all. Was it gravity that had told the world around us to come crashing down?
The wildfire was no more and even the ashes were hidden under the rubble that had once been the ceiling. On both sides, the walls were charred and covered in soot; black scars on what was supposed to just be another hallway leading us to the wildfire’s destination. Knowing that this hallway was forever gone, we wandered down other hallways on our own until we found one that looked like it was headed in the same direction. I was still holding on to the candle you had given me and we decided to use it to ignite a new wildfire. The candle was lost as new flames erupted around it, but at least we had a new wildfire that was traveling in the right direction…
Even though the wildfire had been rekindled down a new path, the light it created didn’t glow with the same warmth and comfort that it once did. The moonless night sky would’ve been brighter than the smoke that billowed out from the flames, and it wasn’t long until the world became pitch black. As we proceeded down the hallway, following what little of the wildfire we could still see, it wasn’t long until we had lost each other. I tried calling for you, but the suffocating smoke only allowed a feeble cough to escape from me.
I blindly wandered the hall searching for you, calling out your name to no avail. I no longer knew which direction I was facing, but all I wanted was to find you. Eventually, it was clear that reuniting with you right there and then was impossible, and as I proceeded down the hallway, I had no sense of if I was going back towards where we originated or forward towards the direction the wildfire was leading us.
Was it still leading us, or was it just leading me? I surmised that you were still trying to follow the flames…but I had no way of knowing.
As I ventured blindly down the foreign halls, your faint silhouette seemed to always be in front of me, but every time, it turned out to only be lone embers creating shadows off of the whirling smoke. On some days, even the faint glow of the wildfire itself would fade away into the smoke, leaving me to frantically navigate the corridors on my own. I knew both you and the wildfire were out there somewhere, so I just needed to break free of the smoke’s suffocating hold—perhaps the inevitability of gravity would show some leniency. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after finding you and the turbulent flames of the wildfire, but all I knew was that I just needed to find you first.
I just want another candle now…
One more.
The Roar 