I Could've Burned

I am twenty-one, sitting on the back deck with my father. My brother gifted him with a fire pit this past Christmas, and so occasionally we get a fire going and make s’mores. The firewood doesn’t burn very well, often producing more smoke than anything else, and no matter where I sit I always seem to be the one getting caught in the crossfire. Tonight is no different. I close my eyes, already feeling them burning and beginning to water, and for a moment I’m thirteen.

My high school held a yearly “bonfire” event, where a giant stack of wood pallets would be set ablaze in celebration of the homecoming football game. It would burn brightly against the dark October sky, as students crowded around to keep themselves warm. I inched my way to the front of the crowd and refused to back away, despite how intense the heat felt on my skin. He held both of my hands in his, and we admired the how the flames danced in violent beauty. Later that night he’d want to kiss me and I would refuse to look at him because I was afraid.

I hear a faint hiss and open my eyes. My marshmallow has caught on fire, which is the desired result for me but still requires my attention. I blow it out before placing it onto my stacked square of chocolate and graham cracker, before taking the other half of the graham cracker and sandwiching the crisped marshmallow. It oozes from the sides. I take a bite and try to taste it. I look up at the sky. I listen to my father talk about what college was like in the 1980’s. I try to be here, but I’m not. I smell the smoke and I can’t come back.

The combination of the light and heat made it difficult for me to keep my eyes open but I wanted to anyway. I thought a fascination with fire would make me “interesting,” and so I watched the pallets burn with half-feigned awe. He put his arm around me and I smiled, drunk off the thought that the girls around me were watching us and teeming with jealousy. I had someone to hold me next to the fire. All they could probably see was how he held me too close to the flames. “Watch yourself,” my father said as he placed a grated cover over the fire pit when the fire became unwieldy. I could have abandoned my skewer and thrust a marshmallow into the pit as I clenched it in a weakened fist. I could have broken away from the crowd and crumpled amongst the burning pallets until the firemen dragged me back out. I could have torn apart my flesh to mirror my aching mind. I could have made it a pain for the world to see.

In the middle of the night I have to stand before him, both of us like ghosts. He never said it, and never will, and I still know:

“You would not be you without me.”

Pain is a teacher. Not the cause of pain, but pain itself. It teaches us what we are capable of, who we are, what we deserve. I have very little confidence that in life there are multiple roads that lead to the same destination, so it is true that I would not have arrived here without him and I hate him for that. He had no right to fold himself into the clay I used to mold my being. He has no right to stay there. And yet he does, and he will, and there’s nothing I can do but be grateful for the days when the seed of fear he planted in me is denied the ability to take root.

Staring at the last gasping embers in the fire pit, I admit to my father that I have been considering scheduling a consultation regarding anxiety medication, and he tries to talk me out of it. I wonder briefly if he’d bandage a burned hand.

“Watch yourself,” He had said.

And I do. I’m so careful.

It would break my parents’ hearts to know that they failed to protect me, and so I don’t tell them. I just sit with them on the back deck and I talk, and listen, and laugh, and spend every day proving to them that failure is insignificant when the woman they’ve raised is unbreakable. It’s difficult to be proud of a strength I never should have needed, but I have learned to be proud that when I did need it, I had it. Many were not so fortunate. And I guess that was mine, not his, because he gave me pain and I responded with strength. For so long I let him take the credit for giving me something I already had. In that way, he could maintain his hold on me. It will not continue another day. I am twenty-one. I am not thirteen. I am here.

Tonight when I am faced with his ghost, I will tell him he can rot in the back of my closet. There is no part of me that he can take credit for.