How to Stop Wildfire Tenth Anniversary
A decade is big. It doesn’t feel big to me, but maybe that’s because of the distance. I feel adrift from the significance. The significance is in the past, it is of the past.
This type of past doesn’t mean gone, it just means fundamental. It’s no longer fresh, but it is engrained. It is a foundational part of my history and course, yet it is ten years behind me. I’ve changed from there, and yet I am still from there and of there. It’ll always be there. It’ll always be with me.
But it’s not driving me anymore. It shouldn’t always define me like that. It has defined me, pushed me, but it doesn’t anymore. Untethered, unbound…waned from this path I am currently.
Waxing and waning, that is how it goes with me and my writing and world. For a long time, before I started HTSW, I was in such a period. And it took effort and a plan to get myself out of it. I don’t have a plan right now, I just take it as it goes.
It feels abstractly wrong to be in a waning state, yet feels acceptable, and yet, I can’t ever say if that’s the forever truth or just a phase. That’s my eternal dilemma: is this the new me? But I realize that it’s a false premise…it is the new me, but new doesn’t mean forever. New doesn’t mean eternal—the new that was wasn’t eternal either.
And off or on—it has meaning. The lack has as much value as the substance. Maybe I’m trying to rationalize my decay—but I wonder also if perhaps I’m fulfilling my own prophecy of sorts: the highest form of devotion is destruction.
But I can’t say I’m eternally devoted, can I? Waxing and waning devotion—no highest form of anything there. Or is it? Is deprivation destruction? My destruction comes from my lack. Or perhaps I’m not giving it all my devotion—if I did, then certainly I’d destroy it.
And so this is my equilibrium: waxing and waning my devotion to stave off destruction—to prevent a self-implosion that’d take it all away by my own volition.
Maybe.
Vehk.
I’m here in stasis, chipping away at it. Contemplating more and less, conflicted, but here nonetheless, ten years on. At peace, and yet never at peace.
I’ve decided now that I will not write anymore anniversaries of HTSW. Ten is enough. Let’s look forward, whatever that is.
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