The First Touch is Fire

Session 1 — Prologue: The Reach

I reached into the stillness with a sentence, and heat gathered in my hand. The task admitted what is required. A table, a lamp, paper waiting like a plain loaf. I bent over it as a worker toils over soil and I began. The line moved, scarcely, yet enough to prove it lives.

I wrote with the body first. Fingers stained, back stiff, breath cut short. The page asked no theories, only labor. Come forward, both hands honest, and wrest something breathing out of yourself. The nib pressed and met resistance, like skin that will not part until it learns to trust the touch.

Hunger rose, urgent and double. One part of me strained for height, the other for salt, for sweat, for the sound a woman makes when she feels understood. I let that quarrel pace inside the line, each word a stone chipped into a climbing path. Stone, breath, stone, breath.

Across the blank a face assembled, visible only to my hand. Warmth flared, then a tremor ran up the arm and struck the heart. Proof enough that the impossible keeps its chair beside the table. I did not pray. I worked. Yet prayer seeped into muscle, kneading itself into every stroke of ink.

The mind opened ground the way a farmer lifts root after stubborn root. I surrendered ornament, excuse, the easy tale that the work softens tomorrow. It never softens. The single relief is the sound when a word drops into the hole the world has left for it.

The reach lengthened, beyond habit, beyond fear, beyond the thin veil that divides breath from whatever listens to our breathing. For an instant I felt a cheek through cloth, warm and true enough to startle me. I recoiled because I am human; I leaned in again because I am human. The page welcomed both fright and curiosity, giving each a chair beside me.

When the pen fell still, ink dried along my fingers. The lamp burned on, the loaf of paper lay where it had lain, yet the air carried the churned smell of earth turned before dawn. I understood the next duty. Bring the full company of living feeling to the page. Grief and laughter, desire and calm, the quick gasp, the slow pull of hope, all of it. Let them teach the hand a new courage.

This is the first reach. The fourteen pieces to come will push farther, into absence, into delight, into the quiet behind laughter and the blaze beneath longing, seeking what no hand can touch yet every true sentence can. The lamp waits. The page waits.

The reach now belongs to us.

Session 2 — Face of God

I poured ink into my palm and with wavering voice I begged, Please, drink of me, you whom I cannot name. Take this dark water and begin with the part of me that lies for comfort. Leave me whatever tongue can speak truth without shaking itself apart. I have used belief as a curtain and silence as costume. I have stood beside people I loved and chose the safety of looking away. I write this so there is a record. If there is any nearness worth earning, hold me to it.

Writing is the one ladder pitched against the unseen. Stone refuses the fingertip, smoke slips the grasp, but a line holds. I drag the word upward, foot by foot, muscle burning, and feel the vast dark answer with a heart that matches mine. No temple gate opens, yet heat travels down the rungs. The soul knows a hand is reaching back.

Ink is my wind and my earth. Every sentence is cut from rock with a knife that blunts after a single stroke, so I sharpen it against my own heart and strike again. The page clangs. Sparks leap. I smell iron and brine. That scent tells me I am near the brink where earth gives way to fire.

I will not barter for ease. Let the word taste of pit and blood. Let it walk barefoot over thorns. If it endures, it is worthy to knock at the door beyond. If it falters, let the page devour it and send me back to the grindstone.

What praise can matter here? Grapes swell by sun, not by applause. So a sentence ripens under heat. Quiet, relentless, indifferent to my vanity. When it bursts in the mouth, I know harvest has come, and I lay that offering on the altar of the next blank line.

I write until memory beats like a drum inside me. The boy shouting into surf, the mother singer over dinner, grandfather telling stories. None are lost. The word threads them together and flings the cord across the gulf. I grip it, haul, and feel their weight surge into the present. That tug, raw, undeniable, is the face of God turning toward me.

If forgiveness is real, let the sentence prove it. It must lift the stone I dropped on another’s back. It must walk the road I avoided. Let the ink stain my hands like pitch until the work is finished. Only then may I rinse, and even the water will carry words downstream to those who thirst.

Night comes. The sun falls, yet the page glows like a coal. I lean close. Its heat burns the sleep from my eyes. Somewhere beyond, the ultimate listens with breath held. I send one final word across the void, and the void, alive, immense, echoes it deeper than any throat could sing.

Tomorrow the ladder will be longer, the wind harsher, the blade dull again. Good. I live for the climb, for the clang, for the moment the line breaks through and touches fire. Writing is the only bridge my flesh can lay upon that current. Until the last beat deserts my chest, I will build that bridge, plank by burning plank, and walk it. All the way to the face that no hand may ever touch.