Make Friends of Fire, 2023 | Hand-dyed cotton, thread, book board
Make Friends of Fire, 2023 | Hand-dyed cotton, thread, book board
"My childhood best friend had parents who were madly in love.They were mad enough in love to drag a shabby sofa from their garage to the top of an empty hill outside town, right where the two-lane ranch road comes to its winding stop and welcomes all with a worn down sign: WAIKOLOA. Their sofa rivaled the village sign in both size and dust. They'd climb that hill often to watch the sunset in sweet solitude. It was a first flag on the moon act of sheer romance..."
"Like a sudden blowing of a candle, their love suffered a quick death. Whatever substance they'd left long unaddressed over open flames finally boiled over in a drunken tantrum. Blood shed and spilt itself everywhere, staining carpets, palms, hearts, and criminal records. Once they officially separated, my best friend's mother set the sofa on fire. For years it sat atop that hill, decaying in its own ashes. Another abandoned eyesore, once an emblem of love, with a history unknown by most, and the few who remembered desired its history decomposed and forgotten..."
The Ghost Ship Warehouse rave fire killed 36 people in Oakland California. I know of it only from legend and because I met the man who believed himself to be its arsonist. We met one night at yet another warehouse rave. He wore a black trench coat of paisley print and tethered seams. He bore a bizarrely youthful elfish face for his older age, with floodgate eyes, wide and inky like two wet river stones. He had helped to found the Ghost Ship with a handful of vagabonds, declared it an artist collective. They carved a home out of an autobody's 10,000 sq foot junk drawer with cement bricks, paint, plywood, and could. They decorated themselves a fantasy. He built a pirate ship lookout over his bed and above that a mosaic crystal eye. He had skills most lacked so he was responsible for me, all general maintenance..."
"Plumbing, electric, construction... But his skills and better judgment were often overlooked. When he built the wooden stairway entrance, he was instructed to make it creek on purpose, for the rundown aesthetic. It was a hazardous exit. Three years later, he used it to leave and move on again. Soon after, the whole place burned down. He was guilty. He knew the electrical and the exit needed fixing. He could have fixed it then, but didn't. He wallowed in his knowing better. I told him he didn't deserve to live with all that imagined blood on his hands. He knew. Some things you cant help but feel. He reminds himself: There's beauty in the black coal mass cremation. One of the better ways to die, he believed, "surrounded by the people, the home, the music you love." There must of have been a moment, he said, where they all surrendered to the great flames and together relinquished that breath they've been holding in their entire lives. Sometimes, he wonders if he missed out on that final moment..."
"We contemplated the opal moon. It was full and fat. He told me he hadn't seen a moon so bright since he last lived in Hawai'i. I told him, that's where I'm from. He said, we've probably watched the moon many times together before. Another night, not so long ago, my best friend and I sat under the moonlight midnight on an empty resort beach. The tides were cold and unforgiving, and we stargazed only passively. I was trying to convince her that her life was worth living. I felt like a little girl again, wearing her father's shoes, trying to be someone big and strong, someone with meaningful things to say, someone with conviction. Where was the fire behind her eyes..."
"Words could not kindle it. There is little you can say to someone to keep them living unless they themselves can see beyond the filth. Unless they themselves can gaze into the depths of a dumpster fire, beyond its much barrel scum, and fine some god and reason of their own. Everyday, the people of San Francisco walk through a trash fire and breath a smog of muck and magic, inhaling a 5 mile radius of evidence of life lived. They gift each other four leaf clovers, and rip out their own eyelashes, commute to their 9-5s on unicycles, gather in parks to sword fight and blow bubbles the size of school buses, operate ball-throwing machines to play catch with their children while they take a 15 minute vacation to the metaverse, propose in alleyways with candy rings, dancing past late night jazz cafes..."
Past that bench, where my friend was sitting when she was approached by a woman who wanted to tell her how that bench was her and her husband's couch on the hill, their special spot to spend time together. But now, her husband was dead, had died so recently, and now, there was no one to remember its legend except for her, and my friend, and me, and eventually no one. These lives, these legends, are river stones discovered on a dew shine marble bank. They're picked up and cherished in the palm while still wet and beautiful, and when they revert into gray chunks of earth, they are discarded back into the river, to crumble and reemerge as jeweled miracles, to once again be held for a transient while, until they, once again, return to ash."
Make Friends of Fire, 2023 | Hand-dyed cotton, thread, book board