a million moths.

and inky black hair eases into the chair in front of me and begins to talk about all the times she’s been turned away. her scripts, her movie ideas, her art. over and over the answer was no. still, she kept pushing. she keeps pushing. when she talks about her work, her hands flail about like a ringmaster — passion on the loose, a riot on the way. 

i sat there in awe. i could hear her matches igniting. her life’s matches, the kind laura esquivel talked about in like water for chocolate. the kind every person is given when they’re born. one by one, esquivel wrote, they are lit by “a melody, a word, a caress, a sound.” 

“if there’s nothing to trigger the explosion, our box of matches becomes damp and then we’ll never be able to light any of them.”

i drove away thinking about the costco-sized box God assigned me. about all the happily charred pieces and those that might have gone soggy in my first 28 years of life. then i thought of the dry, intact ones, still waiting to be set off.

today i turn 29. even if i burn every last one of my fingers, i plan to light as many of those little sticks as i can in this last year of my 20s.