Girl on Fire

Did you miss me?

I missed you! Apologies for completely dropping off the face of the earth--graduation brought on a whirlwind of new adventures... Sometimes you have to step away from the keyboard and live life a little in order to have anything to write about.

I've been quite the busy lady. I work 40 hours a week opening at the Café. I am the Production Management Intern at a theatre company in Boston. I've started my own small theatre company.

You could say I stay active. 

And I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm not quite sure how to explain it without sounding too lame...  I feel as if my insides were made of embers. And every now and then, something or someone pours or spills lighter fluid everywhere and I find myself engulfed in an impassioned flame of propulsion. 

I love being aflame. I feel like I'm running at a thousand miles an hour, dragging a stream of light behind me. It's the way I built to be--impassioned. I love working on what I love. And when I'm inspired, nothing could dream of stopping me.

I got a tattoo since we last talked. I've been planning on getting this done for more than a year now; I have the very phrase taped inside the front cover of my moleskine. I knew exactly what I wanted and how I wanted it to look and I was lucky enough to have a tattoo artist who simply scanned my scrap of paper into the computer and made it a part of me.

"Riveder le stelle."

"To see once more the stars." These are the last three words from Dante's (no, not Dan Brown's) Inferno. When the narrator/Dante and Virgil come up from the fire and brimstone of Hell itself, they look up, take a breath, and see again the stars. 

It's meaningful for a plethora of reasons.

1. I love Italian culture. In many ways, I believe that my Rome trip taught me how to live when I most needed it.
2. I love poetry. Especially Inferno. And it only gets better when you realize that T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (my all-time favorite poem) was heavily inspired by Dante. 
3. It's the last three words of Inferno--they provide closure. At the same time, there is still more to come from La Commedia--just like there's more to come from my life. 
4. Furthermore, if Dante has withstood almost 700 years' worth of time's famed test, I believe he can definitely withstand a lifetime on my wrist without growing irrelevant. 
5. It's my own handwriting, which I believe is deeply characteristic of who I am, unfinished "S" and all.
6. It's on my left wrist, over where you'd feel my pulse, and near the most battered section of my skin.
7. It's positioned so that I can read it. It's a reminder: when Hell is burning me from all sides or even when I find myself consumed in the fire of my own fragile body, I need to take time to remember that I will see once more the stars. 

Sometimes I feel like the world is burning me and I'm stuck roasting on the spit. And sometimes I'm propelled by the fire that is constantly sizzling right behind my sternum. Either way, fire is intextricably intertwined with the way in which I interpret my life. 

This fire is driving my CoffeeSpoons Theatre Project (I'll post on that soon). It drives my almost-ceaseless Café cheer. It keeps me smiling at my internship, even when I'm doing heavy, thankless labor for unpaid hours on end.

I'll keep clicking the lighter as long as I can, and I hope that this flame won't burn out.