What the Match Knows

It takes friction to light a fire.

There's a hunger nobody warns you about — the kind that doesn't ask permission before it moves in. It doesn't announce itself with trumpets. It just begins as warmth, low in your chest, on some unremarkable Tuesday when you weren't looking for anything at all.

Maybe you were just sitting somewhere ordinary — a car, a chapel, a doorway — when something simple cracked you open: a chord progression, a sentence in a book, a person's name, an idea you couldn't put down. And before you understood what was happening, it was already inside you, lit.

This is the strange grace of passion: you do not choose the moment it catches. You only choose, afterward, whether to cup your hands around it or let the wind have it.

I think of how a single match means nothing in a dark room until it's struck — how the friction itself is violent, almost embarrassing, and yet from that small, ungraceful scrape comes something that can warm an entire house. I think the same is true of us. Whatever it is that burns in you — and you already know what it is, even if you've never said it out loud — it didn't arrive polished. It arrived as friction. As an ache. As a question you couldn't stop asking.

There's an old idea, older than any of us, that something can be poured into a person — not earned, not manufactured, just given — and it settles there like fire and refuses to leave quietly. It doesn't ask if you're ready. It just kindles, and you spend the rest of your life learning what to do with the burning.

So whatever yours is — the thing you'd give up sleep for, the thing that makes your hands shake when you talk about it, the thing you keep circling back to even when it costs you something — don't apologize for the size of it. A fire that size was never going to fit quietly into a small life.

Some people will tell you to be reasonable. To bank the coals. To want smaller things. But I don't think we were built for smallness. I think we were built to burn — to walk through ordinary rooms with something extraordinary lit behind our ribs, and to let it leak out in everything we make, say, sing, write, fight for.

So: tend it. Whatever it is. Cup your hands around the flame on the nights the wind tries to take it. Because somewhere in you, a single match has already been struck — and the room around you is only as dark as you let it stay.