What Fire Knows

Fire knows one thing: how to eat. It eats wood. It eats paper. It eats the curtains your grandmother made by hand with the same blind appetite it eats a forest. Fire does not negotiate. It does not care about your insurance, your photo albums, the door frame where you marked your children's heights. And yet— we invite it in. We build hearths. We light candles. We circle around it on cold nights and stare because something in our oldest brain still believes the fire is telling a story. Every campfire is a memory burning in real time— someone passing a bottle, someone lying about a fish, someone saying something honest because the dark beyond the circle makes honesty feel safer. Fire taught us to cook, which taught us to gather, which taught us to talk, which taught us to love. Every civilization started with someone who figured out how to keep the flame alive through the night. So fire is both the destroyer and the beginning— the thing that ends and the thing that starts. Light the match. Respect what it can do. Then sit close and let it remind you what it has always known: warmth has a price, and we have always been willing to pay it.