What the Embers Know

It’s been hours, I’ve been watching, the way you watch anything that’s leaving: with attention at an hour too late, and as though waiting for a fugitive greed of almost-gone.

Before, the flames had been a conversation, orange tongues disputing with the darkness, popping their manifesto to themselves, convinced of their forever.

Now: embers. Now: the gradual settling of architecture in accordance, wood that unmembers it was ever tree, heat that unmembers it was ever rage.

This is how everything ends, I suspect — not with the fireworks of first spark but rather this silent cooling-off process, this gradual recession into mineral truth.

The log that was all firelight just hours ago, splintering with orange and blue to leave my reading hand awkward or too warm, is now all ash again: white as the January snow that undulates on it until I breathe near it and it realizes it’s no longer solid.

Like this my grandfather died, not at once but gradually, his stories fading to embers, his voice turning to smoke.

And I think of all the fires I’ve ever seen: bonfires on beaches and candles on cakes, my mother’s cigarette before she finally quit, the fever that almost killed my daughter.

Each one an ending. Every little one an apocalypse, both intimate and glaring, then the cooling, the settling down of what was for so long.

The fire doesn’t know it’s dying but I do. I've been here in the cold dark of my living room waiting for it to translate its way through.

From wood to warmth to ghost. From matter into memory. From flame to the story of flame I’ll tell tomorrow, when it’s gone.

The last log shifts. Gold dust becomes darkness before it touches ceiling, gods, stars.

There. That was the end. Or perhaps an instant before, or the moment after I stopped looking at it, or this one here when I stand to go?

In the morning, you will have ash to shovel out cold and grey and light, hardly a hand’s worth from all that fire-from all that light all that heat dry mouths raw desires.

But tonight there are only embers, a few recalcitrant coals that flare when wind enters the chimney, when my breath stirs the air.

They throb like a heartbeat slowing, the last words someone in whispers to you when they think you’re no longer listening, endings that will not end.

I could add another log. I have no choice but to kneel and blow the embers back to flame, nurse the dying into living, insist that what’s already decided be delayed for me.

But I don't. I watch it die, see the red dim to orange, and orange to the palest rose, rise to grey, then nothing - the nothing that was always on its way.

This is what the fire teaches us: everything ends little by little, through small surrenders, the slow agreement to return to who we once were.

Smoke. Ash. The memory of warmth. The ghost of light against the ceiling. The story I’ll repeat of the fire that used to burn here, when there was wood.

The room grows cold. The darkness wins. I pull up and get to bed, to sleep, to dream maybe of fire, maybe of all these endings left.

Behind me, in the fireplace, a last ember’s lashes flutter once, twice, then understands what fire never knows until it must: that burning is not forever. That nothing is.

Except, perhaps, this watching. It is this bearing witness to the fade. This waiting until the last for a view of the cinders and its forgetting.

Ash. Memory. Cold stone. The stench of smoke in my hair. The dark that was always here, biding its time until the flame wasn’t there to contend with.

And then in then, something was warm there that wasn’t warm before where it burned, as if I learned to keep heat inside me by watching the fire go out.

Here is what the coals know: that ending is becoming, and that what burns becomes the air, becomes the watcher and relates itself again to fire.

The fire is out now. Completely out. I touch the stones. Cold.

But I am warm.