Match Girl vs. Wildheart
Dear Starlight,
My sister texted me a short video of Brittney—it was a match—we both have a thing for chokers and I’ve been feeling a little Brittney all things considered.
I’m wavering between the straightedge mom version of myself who holds a megaphone to my mind screaming what’s right and wrong and little Wildheart (recently named self) who keeps coming out of her room like a spunky queer tween ready to walk train tracks, take moody photos in cemeteries, and wear revealing clothing.
The best thing about Wildheart is she gives zero fucks about megaphone mom and flits around quoting Baldwin.
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” —Baldwin
Who will win this middle-aged throw-down?
–
On matches:
Do you wonder (like me) if the word match—as in igniting fire stick—is related to the word match—as in a good fit, a pair, something simpatico?
According to etymology they are unrelated.
According to me they are related.
A match is the pairing of ingredients, surfaces, and circumstance that easily ignites something.
That feels like the description as inspiration and will equating to:
love
creation
becoming
–
I made a new calling card.
Actually it’s a book of matches.
They arrive soon.
–
A long while ago a client called me a firebrand—someone who ignites possibility.
Call me a Start. A word that is a star and art in one cute kindled bundle.
What are you?
A start.
What do you do?
Start things.
Starting things is easy for me.
Maybe because I’m the morning star and not the evening star.
Call me Dawn.
Ending things is not so easy.
Are endings just upside-down starts?
–
I’m writing to you sitting on a rusty metal chair in the middle of a field with a yelping guard dog, the claps of teenagers, and the screams of farmers herding lambs into a trailer; slaughter tomorrow.
The cantaloupe sun is setting between a ridge of white hawthorn flowers and I sit alone.
I’m wearing my worn-in Place Corps hoodie and worn-out Instar Lodge trucker cap, merch from yesteryear.
I’m on my last farmstay with my fellowship where we nibble on everything growing here: mullein, clover, nettle, lamb, chicken, cow, and holy cow we are high up on a mountain and over the hills far away from home.
For the fellows this is their first time camping.
I’m not too old for camping but maybe for s’mores and Cards Against Humanity. I’ve never been that kind of good-time gal.
Obviously.
I’m sitting alone in a field, writing you, and finding every opportunity to wander off and check in with the shadows.
The fellows remark:
“Dawn, it’s like you’re here and not here.”
—
The best part of camping is having continuous open sky overhead.
It’s love in every direction.
I think I could camp for a long time.
I didn’t know that about myself until my first camping trip with Place Corps five years ago.
We spent a week in the woods cooking from a never-ending fire made with birch bark and a bow drill, grilling beef, baking acorn bread we ground with stones, and bathing naked in the cold stream.
Returning home was rougher than the soles of my feet.
After nights under stars everything I had called home was claustrophobic.
—
Our first day here the fellows learned fire making.
The illustrious sensation of sparks flying against a small hopeful handful of tinder.
Poof.
Fire.
Enchanting.
Always.
Always.
I asked our instructor if they knew the history of the match.
They didn’t.
Neither did I.
No one ever knows these things.
The things of important beginnings and endings.
Later I learned the first modern matches were called Lucifers.
Light-bringers.
Morning stars.
Historical fact: In 1826, a dashing Mr. Walker invented what we call matches today, accidentally—typical of genius’. He was experimenting with mixing antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch with a wooden stick, then scraped the stick on the stone floor to remove the dried crud collected on the end of it. When the stick burst into flames, Huzzah! Walker realized mistaken magnificence, and made several sparky sticks, which he shared with friends and colleagues. One of his observers recognized the market value and branded them “Lucifers.”
Camping is cut short.
I need to bring a sick fellow with the flu home early.
I pulled a Tarot card for the camping trip.
The World.
The ending arrived—also a new start.
The naked woman on the card is surrounded by a laurel wreath in the sky.
I walk alone to the top of the mountain and notice the sky overhead and the wreath of dark fir and maple trees crowning me.
I twirl like the woman in the card.
I spin out like Brittney and fall down dizzy.
The earth catches me and the sun kisses me.
I think it might be easier than we’ve made it out to be.
The earth will always hold us.
The sun will always shine on us.
I’m breaking up with old stories and restarting even older ones.
Ones where my heartbeat matches the ocean’s roar.
Where my eyes match the stars’ light.
–
Thursday I go to therapy and my therapist shares the fairytale of The Little Match Girl as a warning tale about fantasy versus imagination.
“When a woman is frozen of feeling, when she can no longer feel herself, when her blood, her passion, no longer reach the extremities of her psyche, when she is desperate; then a fantasy life is far more pleasurable than anything else she can set her sights upon. Her little match lights, because they have no wood to burn, instead burn up the psyche as though it were a big dry log. The psyche begins to play tricks on itself; it lives now in the fantasy fire of all yearning fulfilled. This kind of fantasizing is like a lie: If you tell it often enough, you begin to believe it.”
―Clarissa Pinkola Estés,Women Who Run With the Wolves
The Little Match Girl is a story haunting me since I was a child, the cruel tenderness of it.
Almost an autobiography.
At least one I believed I starred in.
Born into nothing, nothing that looked like abundance then.
All I wanted was what I imagined everyone else had: food, warmth, family love, and Christmas trees.
When the match girl died in her imagined grandmother’s arms I was jealous.
She had imagined the kindness of a loving family.
More than me.
When my grandmother died she willed me a solid gold christmas tree ornament, which felt strange in my hands. Hands that had never held hers. Hands that had helped my mother pull forsaken cabbages from a dumpster to eat because we didn’t have money to buy them. Hands that had been bruised with hairbrushes hitting them for somehow being wrong about something.
For years I thought that I was the Match Girl.
Poor.
Outside, longing, not belonging.
The girl with a flame with no dollar to her name.
–
But some other story started in me this year—starring a different kind of match girl.
–
I know how to light a cook’s fire and camp in the woods—and I love it—like it’s more than enough to live and love that simply-like I can love myself that simply—like I am way more than enough and I can love my too muchness too-looking at you Wildheart!
—
I leave therapy and wander into a nearby bookstore and find, in the small selection of used children’s books, The Little Match Girl. Beside it sits Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves — where she recounts the Match Girl, not as tragedy, but as a woman who forgot she was holding the light.
–
A fairytale is curious because there are tells throughout that never add up to clear good and bad.
For years I thought the tragedy was that the Match Girl was poor.
Now I think the tragedy was that she believed that story was true.
The Match Girl didn’t match.
Didn’t fit in.
With the people or place she was born into.
She was rich with creativity, abundant with sparks held in her hands!
She was a start!
She only needed to see that in herself instead of fantasizing her loving care belonged in the hands of others.
–
Wildheart showed up this week— a match— a little life flame—a start—a star and art bundled together.
—
My next question is how were people lighting candles for millennium without matches?
Did they just never let the flame go out?
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this🩷 Startgirl🩷
I can recall the exhilaration of first lighting a match. The realization of what one can do, and once we begin it, we give up control…can make our attempts, but the wind blows as it will…