My Flame

*another creative writing assignment: unreliable monologue*

Downtown LA is such a place. The buildings embody the essence of the jungle turned into a battlefield-- giant shoots of bamboo coated in liquid fiery reflections. I can park myself in the middle of a sidewalk and let the refracted patterns of light dance off of me, taking me back to 1974--what was supposed to be my year. These flames tango off of twenty different individual shoots-- statues, benches, cars, and the miles of glassy windows. Out of nowhere, a patch of unusually intense reflections pooled around me and my chair. It was so other worldly that the 50 American flags I had attached to my chair, head, and body seemed to drink in it’s life water and gain the voice of a thousand gospel choirs to proudly sing of the twilight’s last gleaming. I felt a hot hot, a red hot hot heat build up on the tip of my nose and grow and grow until it began to singe my eyelashes. 

The light quivered. WHO’S broad strips and bright stars! The light steadied and I realized the flames of ’74 had come to revisit me.THROUGH THE perilous flight! It shook harder this time. AND THE ROCKET’S RED glare! I began to feel the heat drawing away from my face. THE BOMBS BURSTING IN... the light was gone and I blinked viciously trying to muster up my strength so I could stand up on my good leg and chase the flames that I had been looking for since I had been pulled away from them in the field in ‘Nam. 

I fell back into my chair and shook my head. The first time I had almost felt the flames’ full ignition, my men drug me away from being consumed in their glory. They beat the flames into smoke that rose in curls off of my charred leg, and put me in a helicopter. At the military hospital they told me that I had been disoriented and was running toward the enemy’s bombs on accident. I yelled at them that it was no accident! That dying there was my purpose! I was born as the perfect tinder and had come for my destiny to be fulfilled. They wrote down on my chart “post traumatic stress syndrome”. They put me in therapy to heal the “psychological damages I had suffered.” What they did not understand was that I had planned to do this my whole life. The war was my calling. That death was my aborted destiny.  

 The flames came to me today, after so many years of waiting, through a bus window. As it pulled away and cut the chorus short, I saw that they had not disappeared with the bus but had transformed into flesh and blood. A girl. Hair so blond it was white. White like a spark. White like the white hot flames that had almost consumed me on the battle field. I wheeled myself to her as she stood there studying a map. I pulled at the piece of paper and told her no need to look for me on the guide, I was here, after all these years, still here and waiting to be consumed by her. She looked at me with fiery blue eyes. Her stare pierced through the dirt and street grime that had caked onto my cheekbones over the years of living out here. I could not take it any longer and grabbed at her dress, trying to rip it off, and get to the heat. She screamed a piercing scream that rung true to what had filled my ears that day in ’74. BOMBS BOMBS, her two bulbous BOMBS were almost exposed and ready to consume me. I felt the familiar hands my fellow soldiers on my shoulders and wrists tugging me down out of my chair beating the flames back to that dirty smoke. The flame stopped her glorious ringing and broke into sobs as my hands were ripped away from her-- the water pouring down to her chin had already drenched out the fire in her eyes. My flame and I, so close yet ripped away from one another, again.