the flame of faith
By Bree Pramanik (@lessoirsdemai)
What lies on the precipice of hope is some dull, red light that glows into your home, almost hypnotically, when it is burning down. It is the sensation of the roof of your own mouth that no longer has the same sturdiness of its counterpart above you, the way the fire hasn’t yet scathed your table, the way that the door—pretentious in its stance, so tall yet so flammable, a lot like the world—is still open. You discover faith when you are eighteen and you touch a part of your marble floor, expecting a current of heat to course through your arm as a reward to your imprudence, but instead revel in the glory of what was once its usual temperature, bathing in the pool of enticement that it filled for you. It is at this point that you feel the globe rotate for the first and last time in your life—in your mouth is the bittersweet flavour of chance, of probability placing the cards of prosperity and demise before you. These cards, so close yet so far, force you to laugh, as they are snatched around jovially by the erratic forces of fate, the way parents pretend to steal their baby’s nose, the way they humour the child’s premature confusion, the way they hope—deep within the cavern of their hearts, a piece of which they tore in charity to new life—that this baby will one day understand that if it can breathe, its nose is still there, that if it can feel its heart beating in its chest, time hasn’t run out just yet.
You try acting like a baby, teasing the thought of termination, right before you actually feel like a baby, the firefighters carrying you away from the soil that cultivated you. You know, even when it is hard to know, that your footsteps—those you took when you first learnt to walk, those you took when you tried to run away, those you took when you paced around promising yourself that life would get better—have now burned down, and because of the nature of their intangible presence, not even their ashes distinguishably remain for you to mourn; you are sickened in the channel of your throat at the stab of destruction’s mercilessness, at its disrespect. You knew this is how things decayed; you knew that death was unkind. And yet you believed not even the most barbaric of things would leave you without a receipt of their work; it was harrowing to digest that they could reduce you to dust and leave no mark, no trace, no patent on what they’d done, that they’d just leave because, to the force of destruction, the elements of your life were insufficient to construct a worthy trophy to keep in its cabinet of achievements. It was one blow that luck had considered your life so unworthy as to be expendable, it was another that even destruction had no conscious intention of having anything to do with it.
Then, your stomach churning and your arms beginning to feel like they’re useless extensions of your upper body, the baby in your soul dies as you hear huffs of conversation from voices thick with smoke about lungs and air and how tragic it is that in this world of miraculous science, where the sky dances with cool colour in the Northern hemisphere and deserts paint pictures as an apology to those who will on die on their sand, some biological stakeholders are somehow—in this ruthlessly numerical sense—less important than others. Now plopped onto what feels like a mattress, you tune in and out of the discussions surrounding you that run back and forth, the panic palpable on your skin, and yet your environmental intensity contrasts the newfound peace that has hatched in your stomach, running its yolk—the yellow of which holds life proudly in its chemical structure—from the center of your body to the edges of your fingertips, from the crown of your head to the skin beneath your toenails. As the world around you continues to take its course, running the marathon of life in a way that forgets death’s presence at the finish line, you take a moment to remind yourself of why your arms exist, of how these were what you used when you took summer swimming classes, when you waved goodbye to your family in 2010 at the airport, when your parents gathered all their trust in you to let you hold your newborn sister for the first time.
As the vehicle in which you realize you have been put in begins to move, you remind yourself that you know the following things: the nickname your grandmother calls you by, your passport’s expiry date, the soggy feeling of buying a chicken shawarma one last time from a grocery store you had frequented for twelve years of your childhood, the picture of your house now entirely burnt and the fact that you are no longer at the precipice of hope, because it is clear to you that you have graduated from balancing on a thin rope to now taking agitated strides on a firm, unending ground. Somehow, you have fallen, and although you felt yourself cascade—the air resistance gliding against your skin as if to caress you goodbye—you do not know to which end of the string you were pushed down into. It is only when you hear this mechanic yet oddly humane beeping sound that mysteriously but indisputably dovetails with the rhythm of your heartbeat that you realize that the fire never snatched your nose away from your face, that the oxygen around you is still taking its usual visits to your lungs, that just because everything is in flames doesn’t mean it’s over and, most importantly, that there is another stronger, older and fiercer flame at the bottom of your chest that the firefighters haven’t extinguished just yet.
Bree Pramanik is an eighteen year old with a love for coffee beans and perfume, books (that, at times, she rarely finishes and at other times, she gorges on) and shows, warm lighting and sweet treats. She tries to write whenever possible, but she can’t make promises. Another thing she can’t do is write a good biography, because what on earth does one say about themselves, anyway?
