Dear Eleven,
The fire will come and change you. I could tell you to brace yourself, but I know you won’t.
You will see the smoke rising over the hill from your seat on the school bus. You will ignore the driver’s objection and get off the bus at the wrong stop. You will run faster than you ever have over that hill, stopping at your driveway. Your mother, hands cuffed behind her back, will be led into the back of a police car, while your home burns to the ground. Afterwards, you will stand with your arms crossed, your right leg slightly forward and your left hip jutting out to the side. A rage will quietly ignite inside of you. You won’t know what really happened for a long time.

Dear Thirteen,
A boy’s kiss will set off sparklers in your belly that will tingle for hours. You and the boy will clumsily roll your first joint, leaving it far too loose. When giving the boy a weed shotgun, the fire will fall off the tip and onto your top lip, leaving a dime-sized blister as evidence. Your mother will pester you about what happened and you will tell her to go to hell.

Dear Fifteen,
From another home, in another town, your mother will gently shake you awake in the middle of the night. You will walk with her barefoot onto the wet grass in your front yard. Together you will watch for an hour, the flames rising into the night sky, scorching the neighbor’s house. In the morning there will be nothing left, save the concrete foundation. You will never know why, out of everyone in the house, your mother chose you to watch with her.

Dear Seventeen,
You will ride down the red dirt clay of Snow Road toward a weekend at the Escatawpa river. The young man who will be your first husband is driving. He will teach you the proper way to build a campfire. You will sit between his legs on the chaise, your back leaning on his chest and gaze in wonder at how the colors in the flames change from white hot, to blue, to orange. You will melt the bottom of your flip flops by resting them near the metal ring. He will undress you slowly in the glow. You will feel the spark when his fingers touch your skin. Your cries of ecstasy will combust into the dark night, reverberating long after he leaves you in eight years, and walks back into your life at middle age, stoking the coals that never died.

Dear Twenty-two,
You will not be ready for this, but your mother will die. The chemo that had set her veins on fire will stop working. You will not understand how to grieve nor know what you have lost.

Dear Thirty-two,
Across the county in a Craftsmen’s cottage, a seventy-year-old fireplace will flicker through your Friday nights. It will become your ritual to pour a glass of wine, light the tall candles on the mantel, stack your kindling on the grate and set it alight, dropping your clothes into a heap. This new man who will become your second husband, who will never leave you, entangles his body around yours on the floor. He will communicate with your skin all the things that he never learns to express with words. This will be fine until it isn’t. You won’t notice until it’s time to move from this house, that imperceptibly over the years, the soot from Friday night fires and candles, has risen up the wall and blackened the ceiling above.

Dear Thirty-six,
Like all new mothers before you, the journey will be trial by fire. The sleep deprived insecurity will hiss at you and you will be certain you’re doing it all wrong. Your belly will simmer with constant worry. Your heart though, will explode with radiant love you never knew was possible. This beautiful firecracker of a girl will hold an unwavering mirror up to both your light and shadow.

Dear Thirty-seven,
You will lie on an operating table, unconscious, while a probe enters a vein in your groin and moves towards your heart. Microwaves from this probe will accidentally send your heart into defibrillation. As the charged paddles hit your skin, your body will rise from the table, waking you up from your drug induced slumber to shout “Hot Fire.” The paddles will leave scorch marks on your skin. You will live.

Dear Forty,
A fire will grow from a lightning strike and move through the forest threatening to engulf your mountain home. The three of you will hastily pack up everything you can fit into the back of a pick-up truck. You will leave your front door unlocked as you evacuate, so the firefighters won’t have to break it down if they need to get inside. You will sit in front of the television for days waiting and watching to see if you still have a home. When you are able to return in three weeks, it is forty degrees inside the house. You will light a fire and listen to its roar as he makes you forget everything with his mouth.

Dear Fifty-three,
In one house after another, you will lie with him on the floor in front of the fire. After twenty-six years, he will douse you with all the words he never said. It will set ablaze every illusion that held your life together and burn it to the ground. You will experience all of the despair and white-hot rage of a destroyed home you did not know how to feel when you were eleven.

He will not mean to burn you, or maybe he will, but it won’t matter. The result will be the same as our mother passing out drunk in the bed with a cigarette. You will be homeless in every way that matters. You will surrender to the grief and let it engulf you. You will not know how to rise into the great phoenix. You will watch yourself burn into a thousand cinders floating on the breeze. Your rage will hope he burns in hell.

Dear Fifty-four,
This is when you will find him again, for a brief time, that young man from the Escatawpa river that taught you how to build a fire, the man that became your first husband. He will interrupt the loneliest night of your life when he walks up the driveway to your new house and back into your bed. You will guide his hands across your middle-aged body. His kiss will fan the old embers into a smoldering blaze.

One night, he will invite you over to his place at four in the morning. He will pour you a cup of coffee while you recount your harrowing night. You will tell him how you were awakened from a dead sleep by a phone call telling you to WAKE UP NOW. Your house will be filled with smoke and the power will be out. You will see flickering, wild flames moving down the hillside just a half block away. You will stumble in the dark, gathering up things. Your heart will beat through your chest. He will step into his kitchen as you tell him about the panicked neighbors in gridlock, trying to get out. When you reach the part about the smoke catching in your throat and eyes, he will light the flame on his gas stove. Your shoulders will begin to heave and you won’t be able to suppress it. He will walk through your fire and hand you a bowl of warm oatmeal.

-Cindy Jones

Cindy Jones inhabits a life steeped in creative expression. She is an award winning marketing professional for a community college, specializing in writing, photography, graphic design, advertising and social media. In her free time, you can find her writing creative nonfiction, photographing the external world in ways that reveal our inner landscapes, making rugs from upcycled materials, building mosaic art, gardening, and cooking. She formerly owned and curated an art gallery and her art has been exhibited in many shows. Cindy has traveled extensively in the United States, spent over four months in China, and has visited Thailand, Jamaica, Canada, Guantanamo Bay and Mexico. Her greatest achievement and joy is mother to a good human. Cindy lives in Southern California with her daughter and two cats.