When Eyes Adjust

A flame is a beautiful thing.

 It dances. It shifts. It holds within it a spectrum — orange, blue, yellow — never still, never the same twice. It draws the eye without asking for it. You can watch it for long stretches of time and not quite look away.

It feels alive.

And that is the illusion.

Because the flame is not what it seems.

It is nothing by itself. It is a condition. It exists only as a projection of something underneath.

At its source beneath, lies the coal — plain, black, uneven, unremarkable. It does not move. It does not shimmer. It does not ask to be seen. Its just a lump. 

It is what remains when there is nothing left to pretend.

There is a comforting idea people hold — that given enough time, enough pressure, enough heat, this could become a diamond. That inside what is plain and ugly, there lies the possibility of something rare and beautiful.

But not all coal transforms.

Some simply choose to burn through what they can… and remain what they are.

And the flame knows this.

It cannot withstand pressure. It cannot hold form under weight. It cannot survive stillness.

That is why it moves.

Constantly. Restlessly. Reaching for anything that allows it to continue.

Because the moment it is held in place, the moment it is tested, the moment it is forced to be still - it disappears.
Because it does not have the wherewithal to withstand discomfort itself. 

I remember the first I noticed it.

It didn’t look dangerous. If anything, it was beautiful in the way flames often are — restless, alive, drawing the eye without asking for it. It moved as though it had intention, as though every flicker meant something. You could stand there, watching it, and begin to believe there was purpose in its dance. 

For a time, I did.

It seemed to love the attention. There was something almost self-aware in the way it burned. 

It leaned into whatever was near — a piece of wood, a dry edge, a passing draft — and grew in response. Not steadily, not with discipline, but with a kind of opportunistic hunger that disguised itself as vitality. 

The more it was given, the more it became.

And it knew that.

I stayed close enough to feel its warmth.

Close enough to believe that the light it gave was something shared. That its movement, its energy, its constant reaching — all of it felt like it was reaching for connection. Like it was yearning to settle with presence.

It never did.

Instead, something quieter took shape.

There were moments — brief, almost incidental — where the flame seemed to be still. Not fully, not with intention, but just enough to be noticed. A flicker that lingered a second longer.

And then it would move on.

When what once looked like movement begins to reveal pattern. I began to see it then — not the flame, but what fed it.

The flame did not hold anything. It consumed.

Every surface it touched, it took from. Not violently, not in a way that would alarm anyone watching from a distance, but persistently. Quietly. Without pause. 

And when one source dimmed, it did not grieve. It turned. 

I saw it happen.

Not in theory. Not in hindsight. In front of me.

It leaned toward something new — something fresh, something unmarked, something that had not yet understood what proximity to it meant. The shift was effortless. Almost elegant.

There was no hesitation. No acknowledgment of what it had just left behind. 

Just movement, unconcerned with what it fed off.

I had seen something like this before.

The way one cigarette is lit from another — a brief flare, a quiet transfer. For a moment, both glow, indistinguishable, equally alive.

And then one burns on… leaving the other to recedes further into itself – just ash.. discarded.

And in that moment, something else became visible.

The flame, without something to hold it, was not what it seemed.

Up close, stripped of what it borrowed, it was uneven. Harsh at the edges. Not light, but heat without direction. Not beauty, but need.

Hungry.

For the first time, I saw the flicker without its illusion.

Not the dance. Not the glow. But the reaching. The constant, unending reaching.

It was not searching for connection. It was searching for fuel.

There is a kind of ugliness that does not show itself while it is being sustained.

It hides behind light. Behind movement. Behind the suggestion of life.

But remove what feeds it — even briefly — and something else emerges.

Not darkness.

But coal.

The flame did not like that state. That reality. 

You could see it in the way it strained, the way it stretched, the way it quickly found something else to latch onto. Another surface. Another source. Another place to become something it could not be on its own.

And just like that, the glow returned. As if nothing had changed.

Except it had.

Footfalls are easy to miss. They do not declare themselves. They do not demand to be heard. They simply create distance, one step at a time, until what was once close is no longer within reach.

The flame continued. It always does.

It flickered toward the next source, then the next, then the next — each time appearing whole, each time borrowing just enough to sustain the illusion.

It did not look back. It did not need to. 

I watched it for a while. Long enough to understand. 

Some things are not meant to be changed. They are meant to be seen. And once seen, they no longer require your presence.

I turned.

And in the quiet that followed, something unfamiliar returned. Not relief. Not satisfaction. 

Just the quiet comfort of knowing that what I had once mistaken for light…was only a beautiful projection of old, scarred coal — hungrily feeding on anything it could, just to keep the illusion of its importance alive.

There was a desperation to it I had seen once before — the kind that feeds not because it lives, but because it cannot bear to be seen as dying.

This was not a flame that burned out of strength, but one that burned because it could not be anything better.