Full of Fire

I think the first time I ever confessed my demise was through the course of correspondance with a potential boyfriend to-be. We wrote emails daily, and played the question game. In each email, we would be responsible for asking a question, and providing a response to not only their question, but to our questions that we had posed in the previous email. Games like that get you into trouble.


"I've always believed that I'm going to die at the age of 26. I don't know why, but I've always thought it will have something to do with fire. Maybe it's a depressing way to live, but at least it's helped me live life to the fullest," I wrote. His reponse to me was unsettling: apparently, according to him, there are a whole league of people out there with this same mentality.

I suppose the thought started when I watched a 2012 documentary when I was about 9 or 10. The fear of technology subsuming our planet consumed me and I used to lay awake at night, envisioning waffle irons attacking my face and paper shredders grabbing me by the hair. I guess I was poor at math, because I'll be 26 in 2010, but I always pegged 2012 as the date. The fire, though? I don't know.

I suppose it was always there with me, from the first time I watched a building burn down. It was Hooterville, or that's what they called it, and I was about three. My Dad took us to watch, and it was starting to rain lightly while the building burnt to the ground. "Imagine all those little girls without dolls or toys," my mom told me when we got home.

I kept a rock by my bed to throw at the window. It was how I would escape when our own home burnt down. Before worrying about 2012, and when I wasn't worrying about bears entering our home and eating us, I was terrified of fire. It was one of the first fears.

Today I went to see a Traditional Chinese Medicine Practioner. Modern medicine is clearly failing me in regards to my eyes, and it seems to one of the only routes left. The doctor was decidedly not Chinese. He consulted with me for an hour, and was the first physician I've ever seen who seemed to truly understand eczema (beyond just brushing it off as a rash in need of some steroid cream).

At the end of our consult he asked, "One last thing. Stick out your tongue." After making some last notes, he gave me his diagnosis, "In traditional Chinese medicine, we look at the tongue. And your tongue is very pink. The problem is that you have heat from within," he told me. "Or, as the Chinese would say, you're full of fire."