I used to be the starvation-thin teenager with the long limp hair, so painfully shy I never spoke if there were more than two people in the room.

To be alone was to be prey, and I hung around with a group of people with even less to offer the world than even I did. The 14 year-old runaway girl who seemed to have been born without fear or conscience. The ex-con who heard voices. The skinny black man who fought for the pure joy of it. The sweet-natured Ojibway who was the only one to offer me a kind word when my boyfriend beat me bloody. The 50 year-old hillbilly who always wore a machete inside his coat. We squatted in empty buildings or snuck each other into hostels and "by-the-hour" hotel rooms that smelled like piss, occasionally even found shelter under bridges or in ravines. At one point we rented a one-room basement appartment that more than a dozen people listed as an address to collect welfare until the owner finally kicked us out.

I remember blood in my mouth. I remember fingers on my windpipe, a fist in my face, a knee in my back. I remember running, running, always running, through mall parking lots from security guards, my pockets weighted down with stolen food. Through a cemetary once from the police with somebody else's wallet in my pocket. More than once from my lover across wet city streets with my own blood all over my clothes.

I was always hungry. Almost always scared, cold, tired. But there was a fire that burned inside me, I could see the reflection of the flames on the inside of my eyelids when I closed my eyes at night. I wanted to live. I wanted to fight. I wanted to claw my way out of my life and take over the world.

I made my way here.

I don't run any more. I walk with the studied arrogance of someone who knows that strangers will get out of my way. Now lovers and friends only leave wounds that nobody can see. Now the hunger is for something that food can't satisfy. Now I have to run only from myself.

Now the cold is on the inside.

I walked home with a friend on Friday night through a chill fall that made me shiver. Alone in my warm room with my full round belly I pressed my hand against the window that seperated me from the lashing trees outside and felt the cold seep into my skin. On impulse I grabbed a blanket from my bed and went out onto the roof.

Outside the cold bites through the blanket. Wind tugs my hair across my face, and a faint smattering of snow shivers across my forehead. The sounds of the city rise up from the sidewalks below -- a man's voice raised in anger, a police siren trailing a pattern down the street, a cat screeching in pain or lust.

The bite of the gravel roof against my palms feels so distantly familiar. It brings back the nights of huddling together for warmth in parks or behind buildings. She is still in there somewhere, watching me, that awkward fearful teenager. Barely out of childhood, but with an alleycat's fierce will to survive.

And at that moment I find it again. Almost smothered under the layers of years, all the damp disappointments, all the dull failures. A few wam embers spark in the open wind and a tiny flame ignites.

A flame that grows.

I want to live. I want to fight. I want to feed that tiny flame until it once again it fills my dreams with fire.

Enough to burn down a city.

Enough to change the world.

Last Updated November 27, 2000.

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