Setting Fire to Our Disasters
We had a ritual once upon a time, Viola and me, in our college years, when we were young and high on our own vainglorious abilities. Twice a year, at the end of each semester, we would collect our pages of failures and embarrassments, our stillborn stories and aborted poems, and we would take them down to the beach. Between us we would share a bottle of something cheap and foul and wicked, which was the best we could afford in those days, and we would wait for the sun to drown itself in the grey of the Pacific. When we were drunk enough and the light was gone, we’d put our papers into a hole in the sand, stack fingers of driftwood atop them, and set fire to the corpses of our disasters.
Purification in fire, and in liquor.
I wrote a few thousand words today, none of them any good, all of them dead on the page. No spirit in them, no life, and I don’t know what to do with them now. Dragging them into the trash on my computer doesn’t carry the same energy as does burning pages in the sand at the edge of the world, and printing them just to set the paper on fire feels unsatisfactory to me.
It’s the ritual, Viola texts me. Print them anyway. Save them for when I come to visit. They have beaches in Maine.
I have too many bad pages right now, I tell her. They’re in the way of me writing something good.
Then I’ll visit soon, she says. I’ll bring my bad poems with me. We’ll get the cheapest booze we can find and burn pages until dawn. We have to. It’s the ritual.
Tomorrow I will power up the printer and start putting the dead words to paper, all lifeless and hollow and empty. I will set them aside on my desk in a nice and neat stack, with a Zippo lighter I bought years ago from the factory in Pennsylvania on top of the pile, holding them flat. When Viola comes, we will use that lighter to put flame to the pages, a corner here, a corner there. We will breathe in the smoke of our failures while the tide slowly rises, while the night breeze blows in off the sea, while the remains of our dead words are put to ash.
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