It Is Just The Fire

Reading Ashes in the Pyrenees

I left home because I thought it would still be there when I came back.

And now, a decade later, I am standing before a burning Aragonese landscape.

More than a landscape, it is a memory. It is the sacred, cold drop that numbs my face on an October morning. It is like a badly rooted habit. A photograph of my grandfather, whom I never knew, standing on the battlements of a castle in his black beret and black jumper. It is a mountain house where the only inhabitants are the ashes disappearing into the wind outside on the hillside. My family has always had the custom of giving the ashes back to the wind when someone dies.

It is my past.

And the fire standing before it. What remains of myself is inside that fire.

And it is burning again.